Women and Equalities Committee
Oral evidence: Misogyny in music, HC 317
Wednesday 28 June 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 28 June 2023.
Members present: Caroline Nokes (Chair); Dame Caroline Dinenage; Elliot Colburn; Jackie Doyle-Price; Kim Johnson.
Questions 204 - 283
Witnesses
I: Jessica Carsen, Senior Vice President, Communication and Public Affairs, Sony Music UK; Isabel Garvey, Chief Operating Officer, Warner Music UK; Natasha Mann, Director, Diversity and Inclusion, Universal Music UK.
Witnesses: Jessica Carsen, Isabel Garvey and Natasha Mann.
Q204 Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to this afternoon’s meeting of the Women and Equalities Select Committee. This is our fifth evidence session on misogyny in music. Can I thank Isabel Garvey, chief operating officer of Warner Music UK; Natasha Mann, director of diversity and inclusion at Universal Music UK; and Jessica Carsen, senior vice president, communication and public affairs at Sony Music UK and Ireland?
Committee members will ask you questions in turn. The majority of the questions will be addressed to all of you, but, if they are not and you feel you wish to contribute an additional response, please indicate and we will try to bring you in.
I just want to kick off with some commentary. It is a bit topical. We have just had Glastonbury with no female headliners. I know each of you are probably going to respond that live music is not your problem. However, Emily Eavis made some quite pointed comments about how the lack of female headliners is partly due to labels mostly signing men. Is that a fair criticism?
Jessica Carsen: First of all, I want to say thank you to the Committee. We think you are doing some really important work. These are important topics that we take really seriously. We are really happy and we welcome the opportunity to be here to inform your inquiry.
On Glastonbury, first of all, it was an amazing festival. I was happy to be there and watch a whole variety of artists. Emily’s points are perfectly valid. You are right: record labels do not decide the lineups of festivals. I should add that there is one festival that we do have as a joint venture. We were the pilot programme for UN Safe Spaces Now. That is specifically targeted at having 50:50 lineups and supporting women by having more security for staff and audiences and other measures. That is the one festival we are involved with.
In terms of lineups and pipeline, we want to sign as many women as we can. We are hugely proud of the female artists that we have on our roster. We invest heavily in the pipeline in a variety of ways. At a company level, we sign as diversely as we can. We work at industry level through the BRIT School and our social justice fund. We are investing in lots of ways to enable women to access this industry. We are continually investing in our pipeline and trying to make sure our roster is as diverse as it can be.
Q205 Chair: Is your pipeline improving in gender diversity? Can you put a percentage on that?
Jessica Carsen: Yes. In fact, just to correct the record, the Committee has published some information on our roster that is incorrect. I can say that our UK album roster is 38% female, 1% artists who identify as non-binary and the rest are men. That is improving all the time. Rosters change all the time, but we are definitely focused on making sure the gender balance is as equal as it can be. We have some amazing female artists, and we do everything we can to support them.
Q206 Chair: That figure was taken from your global roster. I absolutely accept that you are Sony Music UK. Why is the UK therefore better than the global roster?
Jessica Carsen: I am not actually sure where those numbers came from because nobody checked them with me. This was the first time I had ever seen them. I do not know where they came from or how they were calculated.
In the UK, we have a whole raft of policies that are designed to create a really inclusive workforce. That includes things like our A&R Academy, where we have really targeted trying to get more women into record labels. Our first cohort was 80% female. We offered employment to everybody in the A&R Academy. We had 75% take-up of that. We have recently made a lot of senior promotions to heads of record labels. That is one of the ways in which we try to make sure the roster is as diverse as it can be.
Q207 Chair: Do you set yourself targets? If the roster is 38% female, where was it 10 years ago and where do you want it to be in 10 years’ time?
Jessica Carsen: I do not know where it was 10 years ago. That was before my time at Sony, but I would be happy to see whether I can find out. As I said, rosters do change very frequently. It might be hard to pinpoint that information exactly, but we will try.
The obvious target would be 50:50. We are a bit shy of that now, but we are trying to do as much as we can. Some of our female artists are hugely successful acts. Again, that is what we are continually driven to do.
Q208 Chair: Isabel, can I turn to you now? Was Emily Eavis right to make that criticism?
Isabel Garvey: I agree with everything Jessica just said. As she was speaking there, I was thinking about whether we have anything else to add. Similarly to Sony, our rosters today are about 40% female. We are sponsoring a huge swathe of female talent that is coming through at the moment. The last four rising stars at the Brits were all female. There is real momentum behind female talent on the label side.
Q209 Chair: If we were to do what we did with Sony, which was to compare the artists on their own website to get those figures on the roster, what would we find for Warner Music in terms of percentages?
Isabel Garvey: I have absolutely no idea. We have run the numbers. Jessica alluded to it. It is incredibly difficult to do these percentages because it is a pretty inexact science. You have groups that have female members and male members. Our rosters are constantly evolving. We are signing new artists and we are dropping artists. It is very much a movable feast.
Picking a moment in time as a snapshot will never be a completely accurate percentage, but, like Jessica said, we are all aiming towards a balanced roster, and we are a good way there.
Q210 Chair: When you say you sign artists all the time and you drop artists all the time, what criteria do you use? Do the criteria used to decide whether you are going to drop a female artist differ to the criteria you would use if you were dropping a male artist?
Isabel Garvey: No. At the end of the day, we are businesses; we are commercial organisations. We are trying to sign artists who we think will be the most successful. Likewise, on the flipside, if those artists are not successful, the metrics for both are exactly the same.
Q211 Chair: Would it be a fair criticism to Warner to say you are more likely to sign men than women?
Isabel Garvey: No. To add again to what Jessica said, as an organisation we are very cognisant of the fact that we need label teams that look like the artists. We need to have representation across gender balance and minority representation so that artists feel at home when they sign to a label. That engenders a much more balanced roster as we go forward.
Q212 Chair: Speaking about going forward, can I hit you with the same question about the pipeline? What would your target be in five or 10 years’ time in the target?
Isabel Garvey: The target is always 50:50.
Q213 Chair: Is it?
Isabel Garvey: Yes.
Q214 Chair: Are you making progress towards that?
Isabel Garvey: Absolutely, yes.
Q215 Chair: Have you seen it change?
Isabel Garvey: Yes. I have been in the industry for 19 years. It has materially changed.
Q216 Chair: Natasha, you have had five minutes’ notice.
Natasha Mann: I have just been sucking all of the information in and going, “What can I add?” I would like to echo what Jessica and Isabel have been saying about how hard it is to measure an ever-evolving roster, especially across several different record labels.
Before I came here, I did look into our signings for the year 2022, which is much easier because we have a start and an end. The findings are quite interesting. If we take out hip-hop as a genre, we signed more artists who were women in 2022. That tells you we have some genre-specific issues that the industry needs to dig into.
Just to go big on a statement right at the top, we cannot sit here and say that women do not want to be hip-hop artists. We need to look at that. I am really passionate about some of the collaborations we have with ELAM and the BRIT School. ELAM is a free school. We are one of the founding members. 70% of ELAM students—I was about to say “kids”. They are not kids; they are 16 to 19-year-olds—come from a black, Asian and ethnic minority background.
As an industry, we need to constantly try to look at the pipeline a little bit further back. As well as being critical and trying to gather data on our own ever-evolving roster, that is also something we need to look at.
Q217 Chair: You looked back at 2022 but presumably no further back than that. You could not give me an indication of how much things have improved.
Natasha Mann: I could not right now, but I will go and investigate that.
Q218 Chair: What is your gut instinct? Has female representation improved?
Natasha Mann: Yes. Similar to Isabel, I have been in the industry for nearly 20 years. I started out in the independent world. I started in the marketing department at a record label at Universal 14 years ago. I made my way up the ranks there and became the first female MD to run that record label with the president. I have had two very interesting years in this newly created role. I have seen a huge amount of change since I started out nearly 20 years ago.
Chair: It makes you feel old.
Natasha Mann: I know. I do.
Q219 Chair: I want to ask the same question I asked Isabel. It is not unreasonable to respond by saying that you want to sign artists who are going to be successful and who are going to be commercial for the label. Do you use the same criteria when signing female artists and male artists?
Natasha Mann: Yes, absolutely. In my experience of being a record label, yes, absolutely. We look for creative excellence. You just have to speak to any of the A&Rs. “A&R” stands for “artists and repertoire”. They go out and find the artists. They will then be side by side with them as they make the record. They bring the talent through. They would say they just want to be partnered with the best, most exciting and, yes, commercially successful artists out there, irrespective of gender.
Q220 Chair: If we accept the criticism that the labels are more likely to sign men than women, did you just tell me that women are less creative?
Natasha Mann: No, I did not.
Q221 Chair: Is it harder for them to break through?
Natasha Mann: Undoubtedly, there are more pressures on women than men. I do not have to tell you guys that. It is societal. When we zoom in on the music industry, does it still exist? Yes, absolutely. Is there more pressure on social media and within the media? Yes. It bears out that it can be a tougher route.
When we look at things like representation, it speaks to that. It is helpful to have role models to whom you can look up and aspire in any walk of life. It is helpful for people to have well-trodden paths that they can then comfortably follow. There is more pressure on women. There is more pressure on women of colour and all of the intersectionalities.
Q222 Chair: You have used the phrase “tougher route”. Isabel and Jessica, I am going to come back to you both on this same question. Natasha, I can see that you are the head of diversity and inclusion and you are recognising that there is a tougher route for some groups. What specifically do you do to make sure you retain talent, if talent is finding it a tougher route?
Natasha Mann: That is a great question. First, it is largely down to the team you put around an artist. If we zoom out on the team, you have the people at the label who work with an artist. That can be 10-plus people. It can be the A&R, as I have mentioned, the marketing person, the PR person, the streaming/commerce person, the radio plugger or the TV plugger, etc. I am sure I have forgotten some people who will be annoyed at me. You also have the agency side.
A really important part of the puzzle to mention is the management. The management are hired by the artist and paid by the artist. They are the spokesperson and wing-person for the artist. Quite often the label will interact with a manager, and then the manager will feed back to the artist. That is not always the case. There is direct dialogue with artists. It just depends; it is case-by-case.
You have to look at the team that works around the artists who might have a tougher route. You have to make sure there are safe avenues for them to flag up when the schedule does not work for them: “I am tired today”, “The schedule does not work for me”, or “I do not feel comfortable doing this”. It is about relationship-building as much as anything else.
I am also super-proud that the company have been working on a counselling service for artists. Our dream is that any artist who signs to us will initially meet this practitioner who works for us. He is brilliant. He has worked in the music industry previously with lots of high-profile artists, in particular female ones. He knows the industry, which helps massively. It is a safe space for people to come with any issues, barriers or challenges they might be experiencing.
Q223 Chair: You talked about the size of the team. Would you ever observe whether it was bigger or smaller, more experienced or less experienced for those artists that might have the tougher route?
Natasha Mann: That is a good question. Specifically, you are asking me whether female artists—
Q224 Chair: Would you put a bigger team around a woman who you thought would face additional vulnerabilities?
Natasha Mann: Do you mean if they were to need additional help somewhere in their world? Is that what you mean?
Q225 Chair: You have indicated that you put a big team around your artists. You want to retain your best artists. You want them to be successful. Do you at any point look at them and go, “They are so valuable to us, but they are a woman, so they are going to face more hassle on social media”, or, “They are a woman so they might get a bit more flak”?
Natasha Mann: Do you mean from journalists?
Q226 Chair: Yes, but not necessarily just journalists; it could also be from people working within the music industry. That is certainly what we have heard from some people in the industry. Do you ever stop and think, “Okay, we want to keep them. What can we do to support them?”
Natasha Mann: We want to keep and support all of our artists. As I say, it is about the makeup and the talent of the team that supports them. A team of six people can be as talented as one of 16. It is not necessarily down to the size of the team.
Isabel Garvey: In 2023 we have a culture of inclusion, creating a safe environment for artists and helping them to succeed. A lot of the stuff Natasha mentions all of us across this table do. Every artist, male or female, is subject to so much scrutiny, particularly on social media. It is not just a time management issue; it is a mental health issue as well.
We offer support services to our artists so they can speak to therapists to make sure they are being supported correctly. As labels, we are also acutely aware of the demands on an artist these days. We look to make sure we manage that for them. We also ensure that the label team the artist is interfacing with reflects society and understands where the artist is coming from. That is important.
Let us not forget that all of these artists are really bright and creative people with agency. They have managers; they have press people. They are prepped for the world they are entering into. Whilst we are all in this room acknowledging that there is a broader societal issue around misogyny and the pressures on women, particularly women with a high profile or who are stars, they do have the infrastructure around them to protect them. We make sure that is there.
Ultimately, the culture, certainly in our company, is about acknowledging that, recognising it and supporting the artist in the right way. It is not about the number of people on teams. It is about recognising the areas an artist might find challenging and then coaching them on ways to deal with that.
Jessica Carsen: We have a director of artist and employee wellbeing, which again is something that has not always been the case in labels. For Sony, that person has been an artist himself. He is a trained psychotherapist. That is the kind of intervention that, as the others have said, absolutely shows how the understanding of mental health and the pressures on artists has increased. It is increased with social media and the speed of the media cycle.
The wellbeing director makes sure they are working with the teams to ensure that every aspect of the duty of care is being considered wherever possible. Beyond the diverse teams point, all of our employees have mandatory training in mental health and wellbeing topics right from the chief exec on down. We also make sure we have bespoke solutions. It might be dealing with the pressures of social media; it could be other things. Bespoke solutions are in place, if that is the case.
More broadly, in terms of teams, there are things that women face that others do not. For women, there is often a bigger consideration of hair and makeup and things like that. Natasha mentioned intersectionality. We now have better support. For example, we make sure we have a makeup artist who can do proper makeup for black skin. If the artist is a person of colour, the artist might have specific things a white female artist might not have.
We try really hard to think holistically about the total package of support we can put in place because the artist’s wellbeing, along with our employees’, is absolutely at the core of everything that we do.
Q227 Dame Caroline Dinenage: Very quickly, I was just wondering whether there were any particular issues generated by the way in which talent is discovered these days. More and more of your performers might be initially discovered on something like TikTok or YouTube rather than through live performances, grassroots music venues and that sort of thing. Are you noticing any particular challenges when they are segueing from the online world into the real world?
I am particularly thinking about the massive pressure Lewis Capaldi has been under recently, which led to the really unfortunate experience he had at the weekend and his decision to step back for a bit. I am thinking about that segue and whether there is anything in particular you have noticed when it comes to the way that artists tend to be discovered and come to your attention these days.
Jessica Carsen: You are right: TikTok is a really important channel for music now, just to take one platform as an example. That is partly because that is where audiences are. It is the nature of the beast, in a way. An artist has to appeal to the widest audience they possibly can. For a lot of artists, audiences are increasingly young and they are using these platforms.
We have a lot of conversations about what that means in terms of expectations around content, how fast you have to put content out, different varieties of content and things like that. That is exactly why we have things like a director of artist wellbeing. We are putting a much greater emphasis on the mental health pressures that all artists face, but particularly women.
Q228 Dame Caroline Dinenage: For example, say you are a very talented female artist who, up until this point, has been in your bedroom producing beautiful music and sharing it with a growing fan base on social media. Suddenly, you get picked up by a record label and you are out into the ether; you are there in the real world, and suddenly you have to start doing this in front of live audiences, away from home, in a much more public environment. That potentially opens a whole can of worms that you may not have experienced 20 years ago if you had come up by performing at your local pub or something.
Are there any particular pressures on female artists caused by just the very nature of the way performers are discovered these days?
Jessica Carsen: Speaking for Sony, we offer tour support for developing artists exactly to make sure they have the resources they need to support them as they move more into live performances. We also work with things like the Music Venues Trust to make sure there are as many grassroots venues as possible because all of that experience in terms of live performance is what helps develop the confidence you need to be able to express your creativity on any number of different platforms.
Isabel Garvey: I would just add that, although it plays out in the press as though a TikTok star is at top of the charts tomorrow, it is never that accelerated a process. The whole process of signing with a record label takes time. Generally, if these artists do have the big audience Jessica refers to, we are all interested in the artist and all three of our companies will be having conversations with them.
There is quite a period of time between an internet sensation becoming a fully fledged member of our roster. All of the care we have just described goes in around the artist in that period.
Natasha Mann: I agree. Jessica has spoken about the live aspect, rehearsals and taking time. Within any area of the team, there may be run-throughs or mock interviews with the radio department or the PR person. There are various things you would put in place to try to prepare an artist for what is expected. You would be explicit in that because, quite frankly, it is not worth putting an artist forward if they are not ready. That is not good for anyone.
Q229 Kim Johnson: Good afternoon, panel. I have a couple of questions about misogyny experienced by women who are either signed or who are working for a label. We all know that women are disproportionately scrutinised in terms of what we look like, what we wear and our weight. In previous evidence sessions we have heard about artists having their weight monitored by label staff. Are you aware of that happening at your labels? If so, what action have you taken?
Jessica Carsen: I am not aware of that happening at a Sony label.
Isabel Garvey: Neither at Warner.
Natasha Mann: No, never.
Q230 Kim Johnson: That is fine. We will move swiftly on. I am really pleased that that does not happen. We have seen people bucking that trend, such as Lizzo. She is accepting who she is and what she looks like. I am really pleased you are saying that that does not happen.
We have also heard evidence, including personal testimonies, that recorded music is an unwelcoming and toxic environment for women. Given that a lot of you have worked in the sector for a long time, have you ever experienced that? Is that something you recognise? How would you deter that, if it were to happen?
Natasha Mann: As I mentioned previously, I started out in the independent world. That was very different to the corporate company I find myself in now, nearly 20 years later. It is safe to say that the industry has changed.
Have I experienced misogyny in the music industry? I absolutely have. At the start of my career, decisions were made specifically on the basis of my gender and not how good I was at my job. I am relatively fortunate that that is probably the only experience I have had, rather than the horrific stories you were saying you have heard.
Speaking solely about Universal, I have seen quite a dramatic transformation from when I joined the company 14 years ago. In the label I was working at, we had several amazing women who had had children and did not return to the workplace. Standing here right now, I can honestly say that I cannot believe that that would ever happen in the company. In fact, loads of women at Universal go off on maternity leave and get promoted, myself included. I have been promoted twice when I have been off on mat leave. Seven out of our 10 frontline leaders are women, including the presidents of the biggest record label, EMI, which has just won record label of the year.
In answer to your question, yes, I have experienced misogyny. Is everything perfect right now? No. Is it a marked difference from when I started out in the industry? Yes, absolutely.
Isabel Garvey: Likewise, I have been in the industry a long time, 19 years, and I guess I am lucky. I have never experienced misogyny, but I have witnessed it. I am lucky in the sense that I had real allies as I went through my career. I never felt like my gender was an issue as I progressed through.
I concur with Natasha that the industry has materially changed from 19 years ago. We sit in a very different culture. It is very inclusive and very thoughtful about how it thinks about the future and how we balance things. Similarly, our management team in the UK businesses is at 50:50 at the moment.
Jessica Carsen: I would say the same thing. I have not personally experienced it. In terms of how you address the issues that do remain, you have to hire as many women as you can through every level of the company. You have to retain them.
Sony has done that by putting in some industry-leading female-friendly policies. We have a childcare policy, where we pay up to £15,000 for childcare to try to get people to stay in the industry. That is tapered so you get less as you earn more, but it particularly supports younger women.
We have a menopause policy. We have equal parental leave so that men can take 52 weeks off as well as women, which is very progressive in terms of making women feel like the burden of caring responsibilities is not always on them. That is the way in which you create a culture where women want to stay in the industry and want to do well.
You also need to make sure you are promoting women at the highest levels. We have done a lot of hiring in labels and in the management team, where we are now 50:50. That is how you drive real lasting progress.
Q231 Kim Johnson: Thanks all for your comments. However, at previous evidence sessions witnesses have told us that the music industry needs its own version of a #MeToo movement in terms of tackling the levels of misogyny. From your perspectives, is something that is required or not?
Jessica Carsen: My perspective on that is that we are here talking about #MeToo in the music industry in Parliament. It feels very much like gender is at the top of the company agenda all the time. When people say that, I am not sure whether they are referring to an individual.
As you have heard from your other evidence sessions, the music industry is very wide and disparate. It is quite fragmented. There are a lot of small businesses, 70% of people are self-employed. That structure means that, if you are a freelancer, you do not necessarily have access to all of the policies a company can provide. Where do you go from here? As a company, we want to work with our partners across the industry to change the culture in its entirety.
Q232 Kim Johnson: Natasha, you referred to the issue of intersectionality in music. Again, the Committee has heard evidence that black women in music feel like they have to change something about themselves to be accepted, whether it is lightening their skin or changing their name. Again, have you seen evidence of that?
Natasha Mann: No, I have not. I have been fortunate to work with some incredible black artists who are women. Yes, it is terrible that that is the feedback you are getting. No one should ever feel like that. When we look at society, it is not entirely surprising to me that that is some of the feedback that has come.
Q233 Kim Johnson: My last question goes back to Glastonbury. You may be aware that the artist Billy Nomates requested that footage of her Glastonbury set was removed by the BBC social media due to the abuse she received, adding that she would stop performing as a result. Is this kind of abuse a concern that your acts voice to you?
Isabel Garvey: I am not familiar with that story. I apologise.
Jessica Carsen: I am familiar with that story. That artist is not a Sony artist. It is really sad what happened to her. She should not have had to feel that way at all. I do not work in an artist-facing role. An artist has not said that to me. Are the pressures of online trolling, which I believe was the case in that situation, real? Yes, they are real. Online trolling is widespread, unfortunately.
Q234 Dame Caroline Dinenage: Did you say you had not heard the story?
Jessica Carsen: No.
Natasha Mann: I would agree with Jessica that, yes, online trolling is something real and very scary that everybody is dealing with, in particular artists. It is actually all artists. I have some experience of how artists interact with social media. I probably have more examples of artists who are men talking to me about the pressures of it.
Q235 Kim Johnson: I did say that was my last question, but I have one last question. The Love Supreme jazz festival is the only festival with an all-female lineup. Do you have any artists performing in that festival?
Natasha Mann: I am not aware.
Q236 Chair: I am going to ask the question I was expecting Kim to ask. I remember vividly when some black women who worked in the music industry sat in front of us and told us about the pressure, particularly on black women, to be hypersexualised at a very young age. Would any of you like to reflect on what you are doing to protect young black women in the music industry from facing additional pressures that perhaps white women are not facing?
Natasha Mann: Can I just clarify: are you talking about black women who are execs in the industry or are you talking about artists?
Chair: I mean artists. Would you accept that as a criticism? Young black women working in the music industry expected—that was probably the word that was used—to have a more sexualised image than their white counterparts. If so, what interventions should or could be put in place to protect them?
Natasha Mann: Honestly, in my experience, for the black artists who are women with whom I have worked, that just was not the case. They were setting the tone and leading campaigns how they wanted to lead them. They were incredibly vocal and honest whenever there was something that perhaps was tabled that they did not want to do or they did not feel represented them.
I am not sure my experience necessarily tallies us up with what you are saying. However, if this is the evidence you guys have gathered, we as an industry really need to have a look at that.
Jessica Carsen: No young woman should have to feel that way. My reflection on what you can do to stop that, again, is to make an artist feel incredibly empowered. That is what we try to do. The artist’s success and happiness ultimately have to be at the heart of what we do. We share in their success; we want them to be successful.
If that is the case with younger women, sometimes the best way is to make sure they have really diverse teams around them. There might be some people who they feel more able to approach than others. Again, building a really approachable and inclusive team around them is the best way of trying to limit any of those feelings.
Isabel Garvey: It is a tricky one. Everyone sitting around this table will agree that society at large oversexualises women and young girls. This is also complicated by a generation coming through where empowerment and sexuality interlock and interchange.
I understand where the question is coming from. I guess that is what I am saying. I would echo what Jessica said. I alluded to this before. We have teams around these artists that they should feel comfortable with. Certainly, it is not my experience at Warner Music that we have ever pressured any artist into being overly sexual. It is important that we are aware of the broader societal pressures and that we have all of the support around the artists to make sure they drive their image in the way they want to.
Q237 Elliot Colburn: Jessica and Isabel, you both said earlier on that you had not experienced misogyny in your career. Natasha, you said that you had. Natasha, could you give us a bit more of an idea of what form that took, how you overcame those barriers and how now, in a senior leadership role, you take those experiences and apply them to your day-to-day work?
Natasha Mann: What I was referring to specifically happened when I was relatively young. I was starting out in an industry and I was working at an independent. We did not have HR team. There was a very small group of us. I went on to work for myself. What I am classing as misogyny is basically my gender being a barrier to me working on certain projects and the way certain team members interacted with me. You could call it bullying. That would be a label I would put on it.
I overcame that by being a bit gobby and calling it out. I did that because I had the safety of knowing that I had a great boss who was also a woman; I had great connections within the industry; I had allies, as Isabel spoke about, who I knew would back me and say, “This is outrageous behaviour. You would not be treating this person like that if they were male”.
What I take from that now, in this role, is that the importance of role-modelling cannot be overstated. I do not just mean that for women; I also mean that for men in the industry. It is as important for men to be calling out misogyny as it is for women. That is why I am extremely happy that our whole company has gone through bias and bystander training from the chair all the way down to the interns.
We are constantly evolving that training, and it happens quarterly so that we capture new people coming into the business. Within that, we signpost how you might raise a complaint or grievance. There is an anonymous hotline you can use to do that. What I take from it is that it is about safe spaces, feeling empowered and having people to turn to, people to whom you can call out stuff.
Q238 Elliot Colburn: Isabel and Jessica, whilst you may not have experienced it, surely you must have witnessed misogyny taking place. Again, what are some of the things that you have you done to remove those barriers in senior leadership roles?
Isabel Garvey: Yes, that is a good question. It is certainly front of my mind all the time. Natasha mentioned this, but I grew up in an industry where I did not have a female role model. That has materially changed. We now give visibility to senior female leaders. We have a reciprocal mentoring programme, which allows younger female staff members to learn from older staff and, likewise, older female staff members to dial into the challenges of younger female staff.
It is also about putting in all of the rigour and structure you would expect around trying to foster a culture of equality. That involves shared parental leave and really putting in the training. At Warner Music UK, we have a huge talent pool of women coming through the business. We are making sure we retain those. We have a special leadership programme solely for female leaders to make sure they get the language and the skills to develop into the roles we know they are capable of joining.
We have really significant childcare support in there as well. We are really almost trying to go towards that more Swedish model of shared parenting, which means that the fact women have babies is less of a career issue going forward. We are training to make sure we retain this talent because it is our biggest asset.
Jessica Carsen: Likewise, as a senior female leader, you want to see female representation throughout the company at all levels. Training is key for women. As Isabel said, mentoring and coaching, as you get more senior, is really helpful for confidence so you can address things like imposter syndrome, which we know happens more for women.
We try to make sure there is a really supportive environment, particularly one where it is safe to challenge, if you see something that you feel is out of place. We want to ensure people are able to champion other women and that there are processes in place so that, if anything is amiss, it is dealt with professionally and correctly.
Q239 Elliot Colburn: I just have a few quick questions, hopefully. If you do not have the numbers to hand, please let us know. What proportion of your senior executive board is comprised of black women or women of colour?
Jessica Carsen: I have the figures for gender on our senior management team. I can tell you more broadly, but not specifically for black women. I would have to do the maths on that one. The senior management team is 53% female. It is about 30% diverse. I would have to double-check those figures and come back.
Isabel Garvey: Likewise, I have done gender and ethnicity separately. Our leadership team is 48% female. I will have to come back to you on black women in particular.
Natasha Mann: I am sorry. Can I just clarify the question? It is about the senior leadership team.
Elliot Colburn: Yes, the senior executive board of the company.
Natasha Mann: It is 50:50 male and female, but I do not have any stats on ethnicity.
Q240 Elliot Colburn: If you could all follow up on that, it would be really helpful. I would like to go into more detail about some of the support mechanisms you have in place. If I could start with menopause support, could you outline in a bit more detail what the support looks like and, equally, what kind of feedback you have had? This Committee has done work to try to encourage Government to pilot something similar nationwide. That has been rejected. It would be really interesting to hear from you all as to how this is working in your companies. Again, I will start with Natasha and go the other way around this time.
Natasha Mann: I am really happy you have raised this because I agree that this is an important topic for everybody to be talking about. We need to end the stigma and taboo around this, particularly when you dial into the figures, such as that 20% of women leave or reduce their hours because of menopausal symptoms. Every business needs to be looking at this.
What have we done specifically? We have collaborated with Dr Louise Newson’s company, Balance. I believe they have been working with the Government as well. They have come in and they have trained up our people team. They have also helped us amend and include information and guidance into our inclusive management training, which is mandatory. We have done company-wide panels with them, and they have also trained up 10 champions across the business. I am happy to say that, out of the 10, three are men. That is really important.
The feedback we have had from the business is that this was resoundingly needed. That is not just women, but also men who have partners and younger men who have older mothers going through the menopause.
We also have our menopausal support groups, which are led by a specialist GP from Balance as well. Those are free for anybody to drop in, get advice and meet people who they can lean on for support.
Isabel Garvey: During our wellness week, which runs in January, we piloted a few policies. We provided some hormonal advice for the relevant women and one-to-one coaching. On the back of that and feedback from employees, we are starting to work on a framework for a proper menopausal care policy, which would include GP appointments, ongoing support and broader awareness through the business.
The current average age of our staff is 36 so we were focused on parental leave and getting that right first, which we are rolling out next month. Our attentions were turned to that, but the menopause is very much next on the list.
Jessica Carsen: We have a menopause policy. When it came in, some of the women who had been struggling with these issues before were incredibly pleased to see, as Isabel said, quite a young industry remembering them. I was going to say that these were older women, but menopause and perimenopause can kick in at such a young age. Again, the whole of society is getting better at understanding that this is not something that only targets much older women.
Our policy gives women the flexibility to request any adjustments to the workplace that might help. We also have a core hours policy so that people can come in later and leave earlier, if that gives them more time in their day to work in a setting of their choosing rather than in the office.
More broadly, those flexible working policies—since the pandemic, we showed that we can work remotely when we have to—are a really helpful step for empowering women to work in a way that suits them, when they can prove they can still get the same results.
Q241 Elliot Colburn: Just to clarify, are any of your organisations currently offering or looking to offer paid leave relating to menopausal symptoms?
Isabel Garvey: No, not at present.
Jessica Carsen: I am not sure. I do not think so.
Natasha Mann: No.
Q242 Elliot Colburn: Jessica, could I also ask you specifically about your company’s parental leave and childcare support policies? Have those had any impact on the retention of senior female staff?
Jessica Carsen: We have had amazing feedback. In terms of senior female staff specifically, I have not looked at it through that lens. The feedback we have had has been more from younger mothers, who have fed back to us that it has absolutely helped make the choice about whether they stay at the company or not. That is one of the reasons why we have brought it in.
In terms of the shared parental leave, we see more and more men now taking as much time as they choose. It might be three months; it might be six months or more. We have flexibility where some women will go on maternity leave for three months, come back for a bit and then go back on leave. I wish I had had those policies when I had my children. It is so progressive. As we have mentioned, having male allies is such an important part of tackling misogyny.
Q243 Elliot Colburn: Again, looking at the entire package of support, we have the childcare support and the menopause support. You have all spoken at length about the culture you are trying to foster within your organisations in terms of being a safe place to challenge poor behaviour and misogyny.
However, we seem to have a bit of a disconnect with the evidence we have been receiving from women who work in the industry. A lot of that comes back to the issue here that overwhelmingly the music industry is freelance. How much of these support packages do you offer to your freelance women? Do you weave these into the contracts you set up with contractors, for example? Is there any way at all that freelancers can access even some of this support within your organisations?
Jessica Carsen: There are different levels of freelancers. There are some people who have contracts with us where the code of conduct policy and things like that would apply.
Our specific childcare and menopause policies are for staff. In terms of the flexibility around wellness and wellbeing, we do a lot of training for staff. For example, artists are self-employed. We are more flexible, as we mentioned previously, around what the pressures might be and what things we might do now that were not in place before to make sure an artist’s schedule is more reasonable for them or that they are not under the same level of pressures they might have been under before.
That is the way in which we are trying to change culturally. We are trying to make sure that, in all of our interactions, we are being a more inclusive and supportive team for the freelancers with whom we work.
Isabel Garvey: I agree with everything Jessica has said. Our policies echo that. As to whether a freelancer is a consultant or a true freelancer, we are splitting hairs slightly.
Elliot Colburn: It is a wide definition.
Isabel Garvey: Yes. Anyone who works with Warner Music UK will sign up to our code of conduct. Certainly, from looking at other inquiries on this topic, it is my understanding that people felt like they did not have the routes to complain around harassment in particular.
Any freelancer working within our network is subject to our code of conduct, but, on the flipside, they can also use our process to either call an anonymous hotline or speak to our people team and report poor behaviour, and then we would duly investigate. That is important. I cannot speak to the other 70%, but certainly anyone interacting with Warner Music has access to that.
Natasha Mann: It is similar at Universal Music. We have a code of conduct. People are able to use the hotline to report anything or talk to our people team to raise a complaint. That is able to be accessed by freelancers.
There are gradients to what I have spoken about previously, but things like the menopause support group would absolutely be something somebody could access. We often do therapeutic circles, and those would be something someone could access. We now have 12 community groups. The women’s one is the largest one that is running. That would be something someone could access to have a safe space, connect, etc. As Isabel and Jessica touched on, we also grant flexibility as well.
Q244 Elliot Colburn: I just want to ask you all very quickly about gender pay gaps. All of your labels have gender pay gaps that are worse than the national average. Why is this? What are you doing to reduce them?
Isabel Garvey: I am happy to go first. Ours is the most disappointing so I will call that out now. We have to remember that they are based on headline numbers and they are a snapshot in time.
Organisational change can have a big impact. When we look at our gender pay gap, if you go deeper into the report, the challenge is about representation in the top quartile rather than a salary pay gap. We have fewer women in that top quartile. If you think about it, those are generally the best-paid jobs. They are also jobs with quite long tenure so it takes time for those to change. Small organisational tweaks can have a big impact.
For example, had we run our report a month later—we had a restructuring and a number of promotions—that number would have come down by 7%. That just shows how vastly that number can move. We forensically examined our pay gap because of the alarming headline number. We are hugely encouraged by what we are seeing in the quartiles underneath. The three-quartiles underneath are 55% female. Our gender pay gap is effectively down to single digits. In fact, it has gone the other way in the lowest quartile.
That shows, as we alluded to earlier, a real commitment to progress and a huge generational and cultural change. There is a generation coming through now that is hugely talented. We are putting all of the support in there, be it family or parental leave or training, to make sure we retain that talent and they start to fill those all-important chairs in the upper quartile.
Natasha Mann: Just to echo what Isabel has said, when we dig deep on those gender pay gap numbers what we see is that it is about representation and it is about that upper quartile. Whilst we have a 50:50 gender split at our labels—I have obviously mentioned that seven out of 10 of the frontline leaders are women—there are some areas of the business that are either well paid or behind. What we are doing is looking at each division, part by part, trying to figure out some solutions, and working with the leaders of those divisions to give them accountability and agency to make the changes that we need to see.
Throughout the whole company we will have specific learning and development programmes that are geared towards leadership and women in leadership. We have recently started a Women in A&R programme. I cannot overstate what a well-paid part of the business that is. It is very likely that at a record label they might be better paid than the managing director, as an example. It is largely male and we have to address it.
What we have done is we have created a programme whereby any of the women in our business could apply to essentially lane-switch and move into the A&R department of one of our frontline labels. We have seven women on the first cohort, and I am really happy with how they are progressing. We are halfway through. Obviously the end goal is to get more women into the A&R department, alongside the on-the-job learning of being mentored and being afforded into the space, which we found was one of the things that was a barrier to A&R. The jobs do not get advertised, and it can also feel off-putting if you see no one that looks like you.
Alongside that on-the-job learning we have created a learning and development programme that runs alongside it, working with the fantastic Abbey Road, which Isabel used to lead, for engineering and mastering workshops, wellbeing workshops, how to manage your wellbeing, how to manage an artist’s wellbeing, data insights, et cetera, all underpinned with an external executive coach.
At the end of the 12‑month programme there are permanent positions for each woman, should it feel like the right move for them, but also, quite importantly, what we did was we secured their old role that they stepped out of so that there was no risk. If they want to pivot back to marketing or legal, hopefully they have learned a ton of things that will make them a future exec someday soon.
Jessica Carsen: Our median pay gap is only around 1% higher than the national average. Obviously I would like there to be no gender pay gap, but, like the others, you absolutely see these numbers being swayed by senior leadership roles. What we have recently done is put a big focus on more senior women in the record labels. That really is a huge part of changing the industry for the future.
Q245 Elliot Colburn: On timescales, in terms of the efforts that you are putting in to improve female representation in senior leadership and artists and repertoire, when do you expect this to result in gender‑balanced rosters?
Jessica Carsen: That is a good question. It is obviously hard to put a timeline on that, but I can just say as fast as possible. It is very difficult to be more specific. There are cycles in music. Sometimes the industry is more female in terms of artist rosters, for example if it is a cycle of girl bands being very heavily present. Sometimes when there are other genres it becomes more male, but I would like to see that as soon as possible.
Isabel Garvey: What is pertinent here is that our internal target is to have 50:50 for our own executive team, VP and above, by 2025. You would hope that having a company that is gender-neutral at a senior level at that stage would reflect in the roster, but I would echo what Jessica says. We ebb and flow with consumer trends, so it can be a challenge to have it navigating 50:50 the whole time.
Natasha Mann: I agree with everything Isabel and Jessica have said. What I opened with at the start of the session was that I do feel like there is some nuance that still needs to be addressed in terms of genres, which I believe we will do with partnerships. We are already doing that. Can I put an exact timeline on when we would see a gender‑balanced roster? No. Would I like it yesterday? Yes, absolutely.
Q246 Dame Caroline Dinenage: I do not doubt any of your commitment on this. I am really grateful for you today coming to speak to us. Everything you have said all afternoon has been very positive, apart from, as Elliot said, there is an enormous disconnect between what you are telling us and what we have heard, particularly from some of the independent roundtables that we have had with women across the music industry, from classical and opera as well as from pop and other types of music.
We have had horror stories, and the predominant theme of those horror stories has been that they go unreported because women say that reporting them would be career suicide. You know that there is a huge imbalance of power within all of the creative industries, involving those who literally do the decision-making over the future of someone’s career, a career that someone desperately wants and works hard for.
The Guardian’s deputy music editor wrote that HR departments are “little short of a back-covering sham. It is not in the interests of HR departments to allow employee allegations to start ousting executives, lest the whole rotten system collapse”. You have probably read that. Are you aware of any executives in the industry that have been able to prey on women with impunity?
Natasha Mann: No, absolutely not. It is obviously very saddening to hear the feedback, but I take it. I know that our industry is fragmented and there are more men in positions of power. I totally understand.
I can only speak for Universal, where I have worked for 14 years. I find the idea that at Universal there are these superstar executives who are untouchable should they sexually harass, or who are predators—let us call them what they are—so challenging and so difficult to believe. First, I cannot believe that the people that we work with would not call it out, either anonymously or via one of the safe spaces that we have spoken about—the community groups, the mentoring, HR, et cetera.
Bigger than that, the industry has changed dramatically, but I believe that there are not a select powerful few who are being protected. The industry is thriving because of collective greatness. You can feel that when you go to labels. You can see it is about a team. It is not about an A&R superstar or a president.
Although I take on board absolutely everything you have said to us, and I think that there is work to be done and we need to help freelancers more, that would be my response.
Q247 Dame Caroline Dinenage: Isabel, various submissions describe support as limited, laughable, not known about or simply unavailable. Back to my original question, are you aware of any executives in the industry who have been able to prey on women with impunity? Please be as brief as you can, because I am aware of the time.
Isabel Garvey: It is a very serious topic, so we need to take our time. The short answer is no, I am not aware of any executives like that. At Warner Music UK, we have really rigorous, strict policies, particularly around anti-harassment, where there are all of the routes to lodge complaints and have anything investigated. We will act swiftly and quickly where we think there has been inappropriate behaviour. We are not afraid to terminate employment.
This probably speaks to the broader 70% freelance challenge that we have, and the fact that our broader industry is so fragmented and there are so many components of it with different power bases in each component. As a set of major record labels with the BPI, we are actively engaged in trying to support and understand what CIISA could do as an independent body.
It is super-important that, if you are not within the possibly more comfortable confines of a record label where we have all of this rigour, there is a place to go to lodge a complaint about harassment and that these people have their comeuppance. We owe it as leaders in the industry to help support that.
Q248 Dame Caroline Dinenage: Is your organisation signed up to CIISA?
Isabel Garvey: The BPI has funded the initial work to define what the CIISA is. It is still in process and we are in active discussions with them.
Q249 Dame Caroline Dinenage: It is not beyond the realms of possibility that you as individual companies could help support their work moving forward.
Isabel Garvey: We absolutely will. It is still not a formed entity yet.
Dame Caroline Dinenage: We have had them in front of our Committee, so it is in the process of being formed.
Jessica Carsen: Much of what I have to say is the same as Isabel. That characterisation of HR at labels in no way matches my experience of it at Sony. I would say, as the others have done, that robust policies and procedures is the crucial part of this. There are lots of different channels, whether anonymous, online, hotlines or on Teams. As I said, there is a director of artists and employee wellbeing. There are routes where you can raise a grievance. We would independently investigate. If it was a particularly serious accusation, we would get independent lawyers to help investigate properly and thoroughly. As Isabel said, we are not afraid to take action.
More broadly on the CIISA point—the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority—we likewise have had constructive conversations with them directly. Mostly we work through the BPI and UK Music. We have made a commitment to support them, and that includes financial support as needed.
Q250 Dame Caroline Dinenage: Natasha, do you feel the same about CIISA?
Natasha Mann: Yes, absolutely.
Q251 Dame Caroline Dinenage: More broadly, there is this evidence that I mentioned, which includes testimony from women who work at labels, that many do not know how to report discrimination and harassment. From what you say, there are lots of ways to report discrimination and harassment. Where is this coming from? Why do you think people are saying this?
Jessica Carsen: At Sony, in terms of the way to report, we have mandatory compliance training. Our whistleblowing policy says that if you see an instance you must report it. We do it through our suite of policies and training modules. We advertise the hotline in the office and with email communications. It is fair to say that, at an industry level, there is a lot more that the industry can do to signpost. I know that the BPI are working with some of the other bodies in the industry to try to pull together what can be quite disparate resources. There might be something through one of the trade bodies, then another one and another one. I feel like a hub and/or marketing to women in the industry would be beneficial.
Again, if CIISA is created, I know that they have spoken not just about recourse—the channel if something goes wrong—but about advocacy and awareness about how you find these channels. All of that is backed up by the fact that it takes a lot of courage to come forward with any complaint. Normalising how you would make a complaint would be extremely helpful. No company is perfect. No industry is perfect. There is definitely more to do here.
Q252 Dame Caroline Dinenage: Isabel, what do you do to ensure that your staff, in particular freelancers, know how to report abuse? Is this explained during the process of taking on new artists? To what extent do you go out of your way to ensure people know what the support networks are?
Isabel Garvey: There are probably two prongs to this. Freelancers are typically people helping us on a project-by-project basis. Artists are a different entity, but I will address both. For freelancers, if they are entering into a business relationship with us, they are subject to our code of conduct and therefore get all of our documentation, particularly in this case around anti-harassment, which includes all of the various means to report. It is there. They are also in our building. Similarly to Sony, we have signposting on your desktop home page but also around the building. In short, that is well signposted for anyone working with us.
The artists are obviously subject to our code of conduct because they are working with us, and should an artist ever have an issue, we would investigate. It is a little trickier because they are not our employee, but we have a duty of care because they do business with us. We would do our best to investigate that.
Q253 Dame Caroline Dinenage: Natasha, do you have anything to add, or is it the same process?
Natasha Mann: Yes, it is the same sort of process. Just to echo what Jessica said, there is the compliance training, the code of conduct and everything that you would need when onboarding somebody who would be interacting with your company. From your feedback, there is obviously more that we can do.
Q254 Dame Caroline Dinenage: What data do you collect on the prevalence of sexual harassment claims? If you have all of these methods by which people can report stuff, what sort of numbers are you seeing?
Natasha Mann: In the last five years we have had one report of sexual harassment.
Isabel Garvey: We have had four in the last seven years.
Jessica Carsen: We have had five in 10 years.
Q255 Dame Caroline Dinenage: What proportion of those led to any form of disciplinary action?
Natasha Mann: With ours, the person was exited from the business.
Isabel Garvey: In our case, if I remember correctly, three of them have either exited or been suspended from the business, and the other investigation was actually a consensual relationship.
Jessica Carsen: I would have to check the specifics on each case, but I believe the majority of them ended in disciplinary action. We have terminated contracts and we would do again.
Q256 Dame Caroline Dinenage: Do you see why I am concerned? They seem very low compared to the levels that we have had reported to us since we started doing this investigation. There have even been some high‑profile industry figures. Taylor Swift spoke about some power imbalances and sexual assault that she had experienced during her career. She is a Universal artist. This is not an uncommon thing. Does that level of complaints not ring alarm bells for you when you compare it to what people are saying who are not prepared to make their voices known publicly?
Isabel Garvey: We have to be careful we are not confusing two voices here. We have a duty of care over our employees. We obviously want to do the best by our artists but we do not have control of that situation.
Q257 Dame Caroline Dinenage: What about if an artist complains about one of your employees?
Isabel Garvey: We would absolutely investigate that.
Q258 Dame Caroline Dinenage: That would go through the same process.
Isabel Garvey: Yes, absolutely.
Q259 Dame Caroline Dinenage: Would that be in those numbers?
Isabel Garvey: Yes, absolutely.
Q260 Dame Caroline Dinenage: Is it the same for all of you?
Natasha Mann: Yes, absolutely.
Jessica Carsen: There is a difference between formal complaints and informal complaints, because obviously there would be more complaints than that but often they would be resolved sooner. Again, sometimes that is by having better conversations rather than going down a formal complaint route, and in some of those situations a formal investigative route.
Q261 Dame Caroline Dinenage: If someone makes an informal complaint about something that concerns you or your team, how would you respond to that? How would you amplify that?
Jessica Carsen: We would make sure that we were listening carefully to the concern, that all of the right people were involved, and do whatever we could to ultimately resolve a dispute. Disputes happen in every company, but that is not always the same as a formal investigation with an external law firm, for example.
Q262 Chair: Can I just follow up on that line of questioning, which I thought was fascinating? What would you do if you had an artist that harassed or abused a member of your staff? Have you ever had one, and would you hoof them off your label if you did?
Natasha Mann: It is a great question. In my time at a label, I have had an artist who we felt was not somebody that we wanted to be in business with because of the way they were behaving, and they were let go.
Isabel Garvey: Likewise, we had one incident and the artist was dropped.
Jessica Carsen: To my knowledge in terms of artists to staff, I have not come across that at Sony. I will check. Again, if that happened, the processes would still apply.
Q263 Chair: I am going to take all of you back to an earlier question you answered, and please pick me up if I got this wrong. We asked the question whether any of you had experienced misogyny. Isabel, did you respond that you had not but you had witnessed it?
Isabel Garvey: Yes.
Q264 Chair: Did you call it out?
Isabel Garvey: Yes.
Q265 Chair: How easy did you find that to do, and how senior were you at the time?
Isabel Garvey: I probably had two incidents, one when I was relatively junior, but I had a very strong senior ally, so I felt very comfortable going to him. The second time I just went straight to HR. I knew what to do.
Q266 Chair: Does that come about because of seniority and senior allies? Given that all of you have just explained your reporting processes, how easy is it for junior women in your organisation to report harassment when it occurs or when they witness it?
Jessica Carsen: I am happy to say it is a lot easier than it ever has been before, because of things like our director of artists and employee wellbeing, and because of the HR department, where we do a lot of training and awareness on these kind of topics, including mental health and wellness more broadly. We do have instances where women come forward, and that is why I know that those channels do work.
Isabel Garvey: We are now in an organisation that has many more senior women. Quite often some of this is about nuance, so it is really helpful then to be able to go and speak to someone more senior.
Natasha Mann: I agree. I have already referenced how many high‑profile women we have in leadership positions, the women’s network that we have, the mentoring programmes and then the HR department and the hotline.
Q267 Chair: Natasha, I want to come back to something that you have referenced a couple of times. Apologies, but I have completely forgotten the title of your inclusivity training.
Natasha Mann: It is bias and bystander training.
Q268 Chair: Do you ever get any pushback on the training?
Natasha Mann: I have had some interesting conversations. Would I call it pushback? Yes, I have had some interesting conversations. It is mandatory. People have to do it. Quite often when people have to do stuff they do not love that. It is really tricky. I am not wagging my finger at anyone. I am trying to help the company create a culture and an environment where everyone is safe and they do their best work. If we all have to go through bias and bystander training, that is what we have to do.
Chair: We have it here. It is called Valuing Everyone training, which equally sometimes gets some pushback. We are conscious of what that looks like. How engaged and engaging is it? Is it active training? Elliot was presumably lucky enough to do it online when he first arrived, because we were in the virtual world.
Elliot Colburn: No, they did it on the first day we arrived. They shoved us in a committee room and made us do it.
Chair: Those who have been through the online version tell me that it is not quite as rigorous as the in-person.
Dame Caroline Dinenage: I did the online version.
Q269 Chair: Are you clicking boxes on a screen, or are you sat in a room?
Natasha Mann: It is led by facilitators. Obviously I am biased, but I think they are great. It is a tricky question.
Q270 Chair: It is a very tricky question. I always think organisations should be looking at those who have pushed back against having to do that training with some suspicion from the start. Would it put a black mark against someone if they had not engaged in it in an active and enthusiastic fashion?
Natasha Mann: It certainly put a black mark against the couple of people I spoke to.
Q271 Chair: Do you two do the same sort of training?
Isabel Garvey: Yes, I agree. It is certainly an amber flag. It also provokes really interesting discussions. Ours are facilitator-led as well. We are more believers in face-to-face training rather than clicking boxes on computers. It is mandatory. Everybody has to do it. It provokes interesting discussions, and that is how we change the culture.
Jessica Carsen: HR would run the training, so if there were reluctant people I would not necessarily know, because we did it in small groups. In person is definitely better than online, just from my experience of during the pandemic. We also try really hard to look at different providers. We do pilots with providers to make sure that we are getting good feedback and that the chemistry is good, because that obviously means you are going to have a more engaged audience.
Q272 Jackie Doyle-Price: I have enjoyed listening to you this afternoon and you have represented your organisations extremely well, but I am with Elliot and Caroline in the sense that the story you are telling us is not consistent with what we observe and what we have heard in other evidence. I just want to probe as to why that might be. Is it because you are really at the corporate end of the industry? Perhaps there are other areas where it is actually a bit more like the wild west and you would be more likely to see the behaviours we are talking about there, rather than actually within the labels.
Jessica Carsen: I mentioned this before, but the structure of the industry is a part of the reason why you have that disparity. As another witness said, there is 70% self-employment in this industry. That means there are a lot of individual freelancers or microbusinesses where there might not be an HR department, for example. There are lots of different settings, whether that is studios or live industry. All of these different things mean that misogynistic issues can occur in lots of different places. We are representing the companies that we work for, and that is all I am qualified to speak to.
Isabel Garvey: I would say the same thing. I am here to represent Warner Music, and our experience is one of a corporate environment with all the rigour you would expect in 2023. Our industry is fragmented. As per my comments earlier, that is why we welcome working with the BPI to support the CIISA, because we need some support for those who are freelance workers in the industry.
Natasha Mann: I agree with everything that Jessica and Isabel have said. I also believe that this is a very useful thing for the industry to be doing. We are fragmented. However, we all play a part in making things better. Having the spotlight lit on this topic from the Women and Equalities Committee is useful. Trying to think about the issues that the freelancers may experience is also very useful. Everyone has previously referenced CIISA.
Q273 Jackie Doyle-Price: Can I ask you if your label has ever asked an employee to sign an NDA regarding a sexual harassment case?
Natasha Mann: No.
Isabel Garvey: We have what we call standard settlement agreements to protect the commercial terms of separation. I want to be really clear that it does not protect perpetrators of misconduct. It has never stopped internal or external investigations. What we are all alluding to here is that we have all read these stories about NDAs that are in place to bully accusers, silence people and prevent them from going to the authorities. Any agreement we have does not preclude that. In fact, through our own processes we would always encourage anyone to go to the authorities if there was any case that warranted that. It takes huge bravery to come forward, and we support every employee who does.
Q274 Jackie Doyle-Price: I have an article in front of me about Samantha Maloney accusing the CEO, Stephen Cooper, of harassment. There is a suggestion here that she is still not allowed to talk about it.
Isabel Garvey: I am afraid I cannot speak about individual cases. I know that is a case in the US. I do not have the details.
Q275 Jackie Doyle-Price: That does beg the question: would you know if there have been any NDAs?
Isabel Garvey: I am the COO of the UK business. I would be aware of that in the UK business, but I cannot speak for the broader global company.
Q276 Jackie Doyle-Price: Natasha, would you be aware within your label?
Natasha Mann: Yes, in this role I would.
Q277 Jackie Doyle-Price: Jessica, have there been any, and would you be aware if there had been?
Jessica Carsen: No, not to my knowledge. Again, to Isabel’s point, for Sony an NDA is quite a specific tool that would be used more for commercial purposes like mergers and acquisitions. A standard settlement agreement may have a confidentiality clause, as in every industry I have ever worked in, but that would not prevent whistleblowing. It would not prevent the reporting of a crime. It is there to protect privacy in the parting of an arrangement.
Q278 Jackie Doyle-Price: Were we to come up with a recommendation to make NDAs illegal for things that were non-commercial, would you support that?
Jessica Carsen: Those agreements should always only be enforceable for the purposes that they were signed. In our case a settlement agreement would also need independent legal advice. Talking about NDAs more broadly across all industries, a lawyer is probably better placed to answer than me.
Isabel Garvey: I am always nervous when we get into the legal aspect, because it is all semantics. Listening to the others here, we are all saying that none of us believes in any agreements that would seek to silence a victim of anything.
Natasha Mann: I agree. I am similarly always nervous about the legal stuff, but NDAs should absolutely not be used to silence victims of sexual harassment.
Q279 Jackie Doyle-Price: Basically, we all want to have an outcome where victims are empowered. NDAs go against the spirit of that, and we would all agree with that. That is certainly the flavour of your evidence.
Coming back to this point, our staff here have been trying to persuade female artists to come and give evidence openly here about the misogyny that they have faced, and all of them are too scared to do so. They do not feel their career is secure enough to do so. It comes back to the nature of the industry, which is very much self-employed. How do you feel about that, given that you have tried to give us a very compelling picture here this afternoon that you are determined to tackle this and you have all these policies in place. Why do artists not feel that?
Natasha Mann: I was about to say it is a great question, but it is not; it is a slightly depressing one, if we are honest. All I can do is sit here and try to work as best as possible to create an environment at the company with the leaders and the staff to say every day that we do not want people facing any kind of harassment, or being held back by talking their truth and coming forward. It is a really challenging one for me. I do not know what else to say.
Jackie Doyle-Price: There is no real answer there.
Isabel Garvey: It is a tough question. We certainly feel that we have excellent relationships with our artists. If it were not excellent, I would encourage someone to sit in this chair and tell you otherwise. That is the intent of the culture that we are building.
The challenge when we talk about our fragmented industry is that artists have very different career profiles. For some, the record label and the streaming is their entire income. For others, live is their big earner. They might have big brand deals. They might be influencers. I understand that in sitting here they potentially do not have as engaged and proactive supporters in those other verticals. I am not in a position to judge those at all, but I understand that they are thinking about five or six income streams that could be challenged by sitting here. I would love them to sit here and tell of their experience, because that is how we all learn.
Jackie Doyle-Price: We will tell them that.
Jessica Carsen: It takes great courage to come forward. It perhaps takes even greater courage if you have a public persona and/or if you are coming forward publicly. Again, I am not in an artist‑facing role, but, from what I understand, most of the artists who are actively putting out music want the focus to be on their music. As we all know, in the press stories can take on a different angle.
We can try to create an environment where it is safe to challenge, so that they feel supported in doing so and so that they feel they could come to any number of people at their label—or indeed to you—and be able to talk about their experiences and feel satisfied that the people that they work with would take that seriously.
Q280 Jackie Doyle-Price: It feels to me that it is fundamentally about the power imbalance in the relationship. As you say, when we talk about artists they do not want to be seen as victims. They want to be out there and powerful. They are fundamentally dependent on their relationship with you and with other elements of the industry to be that. Culturally, there is a barrier there that we need to make real effort in tackling.
That brings me to my final question. The chief executives of all your companies were invited to give evidence here, and they are all male. First, I would like to probe why you are the particular individuals sitting here before us. Do not you think it would be more convincing to people and encourage them to come forward if your male CEO was sitting before this Committee today?
Jessica Carsen: My CEO has been called to give evidence before at a Select Committee and has done so. He is travelling this week. In terms of why I am here, I have responsibility for discussion with policymakers, but I am also on the executive team and therefore I do have oversight on the issues that we have been discussing today.
Isabel Garvey: I am the chief operating officer, so I am one of the most senior people on the executive team. I am very well placed to deal with all of your questions today. Tony has been actively involved. He has testified in front of a Select Committee before, and has been actively involved in the preparation of this. We actually had a long debate as to who would actually come here. We felt that, on balance, I was best to represent the company, because I also have a female lived experience, which we thought was interesting to bring to the room.
Natasha Mann: My role is director of diversity and inclusion. It is there in the title. I am hugely invested in this topic and I am at the forefront of us trying to make positive change. I am also a woman who has been in the industry for a fairly long time.
At the heart of the question is whether I feel that David, in his leadership role, has this at the forefront of his mind. You can see it in the way he operates in the business, in the fact that seven of the 10 people that report into him are women, and in the fact that he created this role for me. Similar to Tony, he has helped with all of this preparation. Yes, I feel very confident that I am the right person to be here today.
Jackie Doyle-Price: I asked the question not as a criticism of any of you, but, from a cultural leadership perspective, given what we are seeing here is a disconnect between what you are telling us and what we are getting from the industry, it does need to be driven at the highest level. I ask you to take that back to your boards before we finish our report.
Q281 Chair: Jackie made the point about what I am going to say is under-reporting. Single-digit numbers of complaints over the course of five to seven years seems incredibly low. Why do you think it is worth funding CIISA if the problem is that miniscule?
Isabel Garvey: I am talking for Warner Music. We are very happy that we have rigorous systems in place. We feel that we are putting all of the support there to engender a culture of equality, but also to support anyone who may have experienced any kind of harassment in the organisation.
None of us is a subject matter expert on this, but, given that the industry is 70% freelance, they do not have HR teams like we have. They do not have any of these programmes that we have all outlined. It feels like we need an independent body that will give them that support, or at least give them the direct line to report, in particular, any harassment issues, because they cannot do that through our organisation unless they are actively working with us.
Jessica Carsen: Historically, women may have been leaving companies without actually making a report. Maybe historically they felt that they would not be taken seriously or for whatever reason. We have exit interviews now to make sure that any issues like that are captured. We are supporting CIISA because we feel really strongly that there are plenty of areas in which the industry needs to have better female representation and a real grip on some of these issues, particularly in a disparate environment where an issue might not directly be to do with the label staff. CIISA would fulfil a really important role in terms of capturing and changing for the better the industry issues that we know exist, because we have heard them and so have you.
Natasha Mann: CIISA would be additional support to help the freelancers.
Q282 Chair: It would do what you do internally.
Natasha Mann: Yes, exactly. Although I am sat here hearing what you are saying and thinking we need to listen to this and go back and start thinking a little bit harder, we also need additional ways for people to be able to report.
Q283 Chair: Jessica, how long have you been doing exit interviews for?
Jessica Carsen: I do not work in HR, so I would have to check that.
Chair: Maybe we could have a response on that from all of you.
Natasha, your parting comment was that you need to listen to this and think about what we have said. Are all of you prepared to undertake to respond to the recommendations this Committee will make once we have published a report? Undoubtedly, we make a whole raft of them. It would be really interesting to hear, either in writing or in person, what response you will come up with. I am seeing nods from everyone. I have to do that for the Hansard record.
There are a couple of points around numbers and percentages. If you could follow up in writing, that would be really helpful. Thank you very much for your evidence this afternoon. It has been really appreciated and very thorough.