Gender inequalities in the music industry in Spain: A mixed methodology study

Abstract

In today’s music industry, many female workers live experiences of injustice and inequality that, whether perceived or not, are caused by and simultaneously affect both the system of music production relationships and daily their lives. These experiences are already evident from the state of ignorance associated with the absence of databases and records of economic activities by disaggregated by sex in this industry. This article attempts to answer a question: how can we investigate the possible experiences of gender injustices and inequalities when there are no official records to shed light on the basic structures that order the relationships of production affecting daily life? This is even more true now that there is ample evidence of the historical inequality of women compared to men in most labour fields. Therefore, the mixed methodology we used here responds to the injustice and epistemic ignorance underlying the present structure of labour relations and family reconciliation. This approach allowed us to undertake an exploratory and descriptive analysis of the situation of women in the music industry from this initial premise. The aim of this work arose from the need to present and justify the use and procedures of a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology as a necessary tool to research the situation of female workers in the music industry in Spain.