PRS Foundation's Keychange three years on: "Talent is distributed equally and so should opportunities."
To mark International Women's Day 2020, we spoke to the PRS Foundation about their diversity project, the Keychange Initiative.
Last updated 10th Mar 2020
With it being International Women’s Day, we at Scala Radio wanted to showcase the efforts being made in the world of classical music to encourage and celebrate gender diversity.
Keen to find out more about what is being done for women in music and specifically, female composers, we spoke to Maxie Gedge at the PRS Foundation about the initiative and what impact it has had so far.
Set up in 2017 by PRS Foundation - the UK’s leading charitable funder of new music and talent development.- the Keychange Initiative seeks to encourage festivals, orchestras, broadcasters, agents and record labels to sign up and pledge to commit to a 50:50 gender balance in their creative endeavours by the year 2020.
The initiative responds to a need to diversify music and talent in the European music industry in Europe.
As it stands (in participating European collective societies) women represent 20% or less of registered composers and songwriters. The Keychange movement is a pledge to change this.
What is the Keychange Initiative?
Keychange is an international initiative focused on gender equality in the music industry. Our 4-year talent development programme, funded by Creative Europe, will support 222 women and gender minority artists and innovators from Europe and Canada to showcase, network, collaborate – essentially we’re helping them to be the headliners and leaders of tomorrow.
Keychange is also a gender pledge, run by my colleague Francine Gorman, which is a kind of contract that all music organisations can sign to achieve gender equality in all aspects of their work. Keychange was set up in 2017 as an international extension of our Women Make Music fund at PRS Foundation.
We’d been working in response to the PRS for Music membership stats and we produced a report in 2016 which revealed that in order to make change, positive action is essential. People face barriers in the music industry because of their gender and we’re trying to break those down, while encouraging others to do the same. Our aim is to make meaningful and long-lasting change in the music industry so that everyone has the same opportunities and can realise their full potential.
In practical terms what’s involved in gaining a commitment from organisations and festivals for gender parity in programming?
Firstly, it’s about accepting that there’s a problem and that you want to be part of the solution. Once you come to us, we start a conversation and send you a contract to sign, detailing your pledge. You then submit data to us on an annual basis. We don’t force anyone to sign the pledge, most signatories have come to us because they want to be more equal and representative but they don’t know the first steps.
It’s vital for women composers to gain credit, but how does the initiative navigate the responses of some women composers who want to be recognised for their work rather than their gender?
That’s what we want too. That’s why we’re fighting for change, the music industry is genuinely a meritocracy. The huge imbalance in the industry hasn’t happened because women composers don’t make good work – talent is distributed equally and so should opportunities. Equity is so important and that doesn’t mean tokenism, it means questioning the ways that the music industry works and making the talent pool more equal.
What do you see as the achievements of Keychange three years on?
The impact of 300 pledge signatories, from the BBC Proms to Winter Jazzfest in NYC is huge. We’ve doubled the reach of our talent development programme and we’re having conversations in the Middle East, the US, Japan and more. We have a huge focus on progress and encouraging positive steps towards change, so every step is a meaningful one.
What are the next challenges we need to confront?
I think inclusion should always be a process of challenging yourself; listening and learning with flexibility and openness.
Discover more about PRS Foundation's Keychange Initiative
Read advice on developing your creative career on the Keychange website.
Listen to Mark Kermode's Film Music Show broadcasting on 7 March 2020, paying tribute to women composers who have composed film soundtracks including Anne Dudley, Anna Meredith, Nainita Desai, and Debbie Wiseman.