Written evidence submitted by Delphi Mangan (MiM0008)

 

I have worked as a freelance sound technician for a wide variety of organisations over the last five years and have been employed in a more regular technical capacity for a well-known educational institution over that period as well. I am a young, bisexual, cis-gendered woman and have found that the prejudices that other people hold over these aspects of myself to be a great hindrance and source of discomfort during my working life so far. Whether it be small things like condescending comments from colleagues or clients, disparaging remarks in interviews, a lack of gender diversity on teams or bigger things like biased hiring decisions, sexual harrassment, sexual assault, re-hiring of known harrasers on technical teams, a refusal to enforce disciplinary action for harrassment or assault or a lack of policy in dealing with gender discrimination at work. My account of working in the music industry as a woman mainly covers three of the points of interest outlined in the brief given. What types of support exists for women in the music industry, how safe do we feel at live events and what are the expectations we face in comparison to men.

 

To be clear, in my experience there is no support and nowhere to report abuse. I can only speak to my own experience in the music industry, but in the many times I have been sexually assaulted, harrassed or intimidated by men at work there has yet to be any disciplinary action made or consequences for the man in question. This is an issue I believe to be particularly problematic in the technical areas of the music industry.

 

It is significantly harder to receive technical training as a person from any minority background as there aren’t many courses you can take to learn to be a technician. Most of us learn by having a friend or a connection who agrees to teach us if we shadow them for free, which rules out anyone without the privilege to not earn money for the work they complete. I was very lucky to not be subjected to the system of unpaid learning, otherwise I would not be a technician today. Considering that most technicians tend to be cis, white, heterosexual men, they hire in kind and pick their friends for teams. Tech work is very physical, it requires you to lift heavy equipment, climb ladders, use tools, build structures and work long and unsociable hours - often under intense pressure. These aspects of the role are often used as an excuse to discourage women from applying for the work and a rationale from male managers as to why they haven’t hired a woman. All of this then feeds into what makes it so difficult to report harassment, once you do manage to push your way on to a team. I have often found that in large teams I am either treated as significantly less capable or trustworthy than colleagues, or I am treated as “one of the lads”. In the former instance, if you begin to experience difficult behaviour from a colleague, you are left with the worry that you won’t be believed, or that you are making a big deal out of something that you should just tolerate in order to get on with others. As regards to the latter, you are actively disbelieved because no-one regards you as a woman (who may face difficulties of harassment that the rest of the team won’t) and therefore you cannot have been viewed as a target of sexual misconduct. You’re not sexually attractive - you’re just a lad!

 

I have often found myself facing the difficult decision of whether or not to remain silent, endure harassment and keep my job or to report it, be ostracised and lose my work. The occurrence of Covid has made this all the more difficult because freelance work has been so scarce for so long. Even if you yourself are willing to make a stand and report someone else, there is no guarantee your immediate manager or supervisor will as they fear for their job too. I have also found that there is very little difference between being an in-house member of staff and facing gender discrimination and being a freelancer up against the same thing. While organisations are obliged to look as though they are taking complaints seriously, it is often just fluff and nothing structural or lasting is done. That being said, there is even less playing pretend when it comes to working as a freelancer.

 

In the last month, I was hired at a venue where I had previously been harassed repeatedly by a permanent staff member who had since left the organisation and, in fact, the country. Over the 10 years he did work for the venue in question, multiple women came forward and reported his behaviour towards them as predatory and inappropriate, myself included. He would often follow me around the building and wait for me to be alone before making lewd and deeply inappropriate comments about my appearance, his sexual prowess and his relationship status. I would cry after most shifts - but only when I got home. It was after a few days of this that one of the other men on the team approached me and told me to let him know if any of the other technicians were ‘being creepy’ because ‘some of them have a history’. I mentioned his name and it was confirmed that he was ‘one of the difficult ones’. Though this colleague knew about my harasser’s previous behaviour, he hadn’t warned me beforehand and did nothing after I told him. At the end of the show run I reported it to my immediate manager, the hiring manager/head technician and also members of the production team - who promised he would no longer be hired. When I returned as a favour to management this June, I was absolutely appalled to find that he had been flown back into the country to work at the venue for the weekend. Not only that, but he had been put on the exact same shift as me, only feet away from my control desk. When I raised it with management they said they had ‘forgotten about the issue between the two of us’ and that it was too late to change staffing - this came from the head of the entire venue. The problematic colleague then proceeded to spend the full 15 hour shift trying to talk to me in person, down radios and through other colleagues - to my increasing discomfort. After all this I sent an email detailing my distress and asking what the organisation was planning to do to systematically change the culture of their venue so that there would be a clear procedure for dealing with this kind of behaviour in future and a commitment to protecting their workers. There was no response and I have since ceased to receive offers of work from them. That is what happens when you report harassment as a freelancer more often than not, you just don’t get hired again and the culture never changes. You have nowhere to go, no-one to report to and in the end, no work.

 

In terms of how safe we feel at music events - I think it is about as safe as I feel everywhere else - not very. You can put it out of your mind and try and have fun, but it takes one instance of someone being creepy, showing aggression, one report of another woman being spiked in a venue nearby, a woman being murdered on the way home the weekend before; and you are reminded you are not safe in the slightest. Ask Angela or initiatives to protect each other from being raped or spiked in venues are pretty paltry offerings in the face of a system that teaches young men that our consent is not of paramount importance and that there is not consistent punishment for violating that boundary.

 

I work as the technical manager for a venue and I am the only member of management that is female. I am responsible for ensuring the physical safety of performers and attendees around performance equipment and facilitating them putting on the show they desire. Last year, at a large event, I noticed a security guard acting strangely and leering/following young female audience-members during a break between sets. I immediately reported it to the head of security and asked that he switch out the guard. On a team of 15 guards, only two were female, covering a venue of up to 1000 capacity. The head of security did not swap the guard out, even after I was forceful and reminded him of my seniority within the building. I later found out that a little after my concerns were raised the guard in question, while removing a girl from sitting on her friend’s shoulders, had pushed his hand up her top and under her bra and groped her before she ran away crying and reported it to a bartender. She was 18. The guard was removed from the shift but faced no further punishment. I was unspeakably furious, not only because the girl had been harmed, but because even when women do sit in positions of power they are not taken seriously when considering threats to the safety of themselves or other women. When I reported the guard, I was not only speaking as a professional who recognised him as doing a bad job, I was also speaking as a woman with experience of the kind of behaviour he was exhibiting and what often comes after it. In the aftermath of it all, I expressed my outrage and found that not only were the other management members put-off by my anger, but that there is actually no venue policy for dealing with harassment of any kind towards staff or audience members. The vast majority of my time is spent in music venues, either as a musician myself, supporting my friends, or working at them in a variety of capacities. I would say that I am always conscious and aware that I am not safe and that if anything were to happen, there is little I could do to fight it.

 

Lastly, in terms of the differences in expectation for men and women, I would just say this. When it comes to misogyny and gender discrimination in the music industry, I have found that there is little to no expectation on men from each other. While I might hope that my colleagues would support me in times of difficulty at work, I have mostly been disappointed. I think a huge issue in all of this is that men often aren’t expected to be a part of the change. Harassment and misogyny are seen as women’s issues, rather than something often discussed by women as a result of the treatment they receive from men - which implies their inherent involvement. The expectation on women is far greater. It seems that our role is to experience, avoid, overcome, withstand, analyse, discuss and understand misogyny so that men don’t have to. We are, more often than not, left with the discussion and the expectation to enact change in our industries, all the while being hindered by those men who would prefer not to change their way of being to accommodate the comfort of others. In my industry in particular, in my sector, we are expected to be tough but approachable, coarse, butch and uninterested and, ideally, accepting and invisible. I have found that my refusal to sit within those boundaries has often proved offensive to the more ‘old-school’ members of the tech industry and has resulted in my punishment in one way or another. Whether that be using me as a show pony to prove that teams are diverse because I, and I alone, am among them, or assigning me undesirable work that I am massively over-qualified for.

 

In short, whenever I feel like things are getting better in my industry, I am often given a sharp reminder that change, safety and basic respect within the workplace towards minorities like myself is a long way off. Real, genuine progress can only be made when more diverse groups are given the opportunity to access my field and proper process is enforced in order to allow them to remain once they finally reach it. We need representation in all levels of our industry and more strict and clear guidelines as to what happens when someone expresses misogynistic tendencies - with legal and pastoral support to those who suffer the consequences of working in an industry they love, which is doubtless hostile and antiquated when it comes to the fair treatment of minorities.

 

July 2022