Grammy Task Force Aims To Expand Opportunities For Female Musicians

The Recording Academy's diversity task force wants to create more opportunities for female music producers and engineers.

On Friday, it announced the Producer & Engineer Inclusion Initiative. The initiative calls on all record labels, musicians and others to consider at least two women when hiring producers and engineers for a project. The Recording Academy also created a webpage "dedicated solely to facilitating the process of identifying working female producers and engineers." 

The new plan sounds an awful lot like Hollywood's so-called "inclusion riders." Actress Frances McDormand introduced the term to the general public last year during her Oscars acceptance speech. An inclusion rider is a stipulation that can be inserted in an actor's contract, which calls for a certain level of diversity among a film's cast and crew.

The Recording Academy created its diversity task force following backlash from the 2018 Grammys. That's the year that women or female-fronted bands won just 17 of the 80-plus awards. Part of that might be due to the gender gap in the music industry. A 2018 USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study found just 2 percent of music producers and 3 percent of engineers/mixers across popular music are women.