Bitch or self-exploiter

It now returns every year, and one can certainly expect it to become a habit: the Swiss music industry's Equality Day, the Empowerment Day. Helvetia rockt, the Schweizer Musiksyndikat, the Rockförderverein Basel and Musikschaffende Schweiz have come together as organizers to address - as the announcement states - "the presence, status and proportion of women and men in the Swiss jazz and pop music scene". The aim is to "develop concrete, practicable solutions for the change process". This and the formats are extremely appealing: concerts by bands from Helvetia rockt's young talent promotion program, network meetings, discussions and numerous workshops, some held at the same time, complement each other perfectly; topics such as balancing work and family life, strategies against sexism on the net, reflections on the pitfalls of the empowerment concept, gender-equitable financial support and humane action in the music business involve musicians, their family and professional environment, but also media professionals and funding bodies in equal measure. A well-thought-out all-round package, balanced between music and lyrics, production and reception, work and pleasure. And a high demand on itself to want to negotiate these complex topics in a concentrated and results-oriented manner.

The two workshops attended on Empowering - clichés, pitfalls and opportunities and Gender-equitable promotion live above all through the exchange of experiences between those "directly affected" in the audience. And one is amazed (in the first workshop mentioned) at how narrow the scope for action still is for female musicians in the popular music industry: if they go to the late after-event parties where the gigs are negotiated, women get the reputation of flirting or sleeping their way into gigs. If they don't do this, partly because they don't want to be in a male rope line, it becomes difficult to get a gig at all. If they act tough and demanding in fee negotiations, they are said to be arrogant and quickly become "difficult as a person" and a "bitch". If they hide their light, supposedly beautifully feminine, under a bushel, we will probably have to organize an Equal Pay Day for a long time to come. And there is a palpable fatigue: having to repeatedly confront gender discrimination, whether spoken or unspoken, to verbalize it, to argue against it leads to frustration. Not least because the gender issues in the LGBT scene have become much broader in the meantime; because we believe we know that discrimination is not only based on the gender other, but that several factors always interact. Together, we are somewhat perplexed by the gap between reports of experiences that seem to point back to the beginnings of the women's movement: a man's world and macho alliances; and the knowledge of how things should actually and legally be.

At the workshop on gender-equitable funding, a fundamentally different problem arose: while there are now statistics on gender distribution in the Swiss concert and festival scene (according to organizer Yvonne Meyer, the proportion of women on stage is 10 to 20 percent), it is completely unclear what proportion of women receive funding for their pop projects in Switzerland. The aforementioned demands for a time-limited gender quota in funding, for family-friendly submission deadlines for applications, for ethical guidelines for the composition and term of office in commissions, for funding that is not exclusively results-oriented, including for "time-outs", hovered in a vacuum. As urgent as they may be, their actual relevance is difficult to prove. There was even disagreement as to whether specific means of promoting women already exist or should exist in Switzerland - whereas in the state-supported promotion of science, these vessels, statistics and measures have been in place for some time.

What remains? A rich basis for discussion on what empowerment could look like without perpetuating gender stereotypes; many urgent fields of work, including theoretical ones; and the need for networking beyond one's own sphere of activity. Material for the coming years, which could perhaps have a more concrete impact with a narrower focus. It is sorely needed.