How female pop producers are taking the controls

“I’m stubborn,” says record producer Catherine Marks. “If you tell me there’s something I can’t do, then I will show you that I can.” So when she was pulled aside early in her career and told that “there are very few women working in studios and those who try it tend not to last”, it was “like a red rag to a bull”.

That stubbornness has now paid off. Two weeks ago, Australian-born, UK-based Marks won Producer of the Year at the Music Producers Guild Awards in London for her work on Boygenius’s Grammy-winning album The Record.

There is a sisterly vibe when I meet Marks backstage at the ceremony, where her friends and fans are lining up to congratulate her. “This is all very cool,” she grins, chinking glasses with Emily B Lazar, recipient of this year’s Inspiration Award: “But the number of women in this industry is still unacceptably low.”

The figures bear this out. Only 3.4 per cent of the producers credited on the songs appearing on America’s Billboard Year-End Hot 100 Chart in 2022 were female, according to a 2023 report sponsored by Spotify. A further study revealed that men outnumbered women and non-binary people by a ratio of 19:1 on the tech credits of 2022’s 757 most-streamed tracks.

Why are there so few women at the controls of popular music? The women I speak to at the MPG awards all point the finger at a patriarchal culture that has excluded women in three ways. First, women have historically been deterred from the technical side of the job. Second, the long, unsociable hours have made it difficult to balance the occupation with family life. And third, the risk of sexual harassment by male bosses and musicians has made studios feel like unsafe spaces.

There have been notable exceptions. In the 1950s, the multitalented Ethel Gabriel — then secretary to one of RCA’s Artists and Repertoire men — convinced her boss to give her a shot at production. She ended up producing more than 5,000 records (including cuts by Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton) and later oversaw the first digitally remastered album. In the 1970s and 1980s, Sylvia Robinson, aka “The Mother of Hip Hop”, was at the boards for milestones such as Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message”.

But even those who did make it have faced outsized obstacles. Sylvia Massy, who went on to work with Prince, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Beastie Boys, was repeatedly rejected when she applied for studio work in 1980s California. Speaking from her studio in Oregon, she tells me she resorted to lurking in record company reception areas and studio car parks to get her foot in the door.

Massy was lucky that her “electric ears” were noticed by Rick Rubin, who hired her as an engineer. “Some of the male artists Rubin was producing, like Johnny Cash, were surprised to see a woman running the cables around a room in those days,” recalls Massy. She decided the way forward was to be “a good hang”. “I think that’s good advice to young women — learn to let little comments just roll off your back.”

Nevertheless, Massy suspects she had to work harder than her male rivals to prove her worth. On the night before Rubin brought Smashing Pumpkins into the studio during sessions for 1998’s Adore, Massy enlisted a band with a similar sound. “I got them to play Smashing Pumpkins songs until I’d mic-ed up everything perfectly. When the real band came in the next morning, we were off and running.”

I’m a woman over 40, I’m not white, I’m gay, I’m a mother. None of these things should prevent me from making music

Massy believes that “most women’s biology stopped them getting into studio work in the 1980s and ’90s . . . I have a wonderful marriage but it took a long time to find a partner who could deal with my long hours and my travel.”

Marks winces in recognition of Massy’s tale, despite being a generation younger: “The hours I worked for the first seven to 10 years of my career were not conducive to having a relationship, let alone a family . . . In that first decade I just existed in a studio and that was my choice. I saw that was the commitment required if I wanted to get to the level I aspired to.”

Born in Melbourne, Marks is a classically trained pianist who cut her teeth as an assistant at Assault & Battery studios and got her big break engineering Foals’ 2013 breakthrough album Holy Fire. She credits male mentors such as Flood and Alan Moulder for being very supportive. “I think a female presence changes the energy a little and people are better behaved. I was very fortunate that I was never made to feel not welcome.”

Not all were so fortunate. Steph Marziano recalls ending plenty of early studio days in tears. The Philadelphia-born producer and engineer, who has since worked with Sam Smith, Bruno Major and Mumford & Sons, says that observing the “big, bullyish” style of many male producers made her feel she wasn’t cut out for the job. She ended up in therapy before realising that some artists “might not want the kind of producer who takes up all the space in the room . . . many artists actually want the space for themselves”.

Grammy-winning mastering engineer Emily B Lazar, who has mixed music for Beck, Dolly Parton and Coldplay, knows that first hand. Her first studio experiences were as a singer-songwriter in the 1990s, where she observed male engineers “pretending to turn knobs and move faders when I asked for the sound to be changed”. Determined to take control, she went “from being terrified of the tech to jumping right into music’s Mission Control,” signing up for New York University’s prestigious Music Technology programme. She was the only woman on the course.

“Music is a raw, intense, human experience,” says Lazar. “If you’re a songwriter divulging your deepest feelings and fears, your romantic hopes and history, then you’re putting whoever else is in the room at an emotional advantage. So it’s a relationship that has to be respected and historically that hasn’t always happened. There have been producers who’ve not been great around substance abuse, said ‘take another couple of those, I wanna hear you cry’.” She shakes her head: “That’s the culture we’re here to change.”

Eve Horne, an artist, producer, educator and the MPG’s UK Music Diversity Rep, is determined to spearhead that change in the UK. “I’m a woman over 40, I’m not white, I’m gay, I’m a mother,” she says. “None of these things should prevent me from making music.” She runs courses designed to boost the confidence of women and non-binary people in the studio.

But she expresses anger over the UK government’s rejection of recommendations made by the Misogyny in Music report. Published in January, it depicted an industry entrenched in a “boys’ club” culture, where sexual harassment, unequal pay and limited opportunities persist.

Katie Tavini, mastering engineer and co-founder of networking hub 2% Rising, says the government’s response to the report “feels like a kick in the face for women who have been brave enough to come forward with stories of such traumatic and demoralising experiences. It’s heartbreaking because I helped compile that report and I know the awful details.”

But all the women I meet at the MPG awards are optimistic. Horne, who has recently run her first songwriting camp for mothers, was “so happy to see the support and creativity that was flourishing there between artists, engineers and producers. We had a 20-year-old woman breastfeeding her baby in the studio and that was wonderful.”

Everyone who tells me a troubling story of sexual harassment also tells me “not to make too much of” their experiences because they don’t want to deter young women — and because, as one puts it, “the culture really has changed — those guys are much less likely to try anything now”.

Marks agrees that the studio environment is increasingly inclusive. “It’s unlikely you’ll spend 12 to 16 hours on a session these days,” she says. “The norm is eight to 10 hours and most studios have cut-offs . . . That hasn’t been bad for the music — it can focus the mind. Young engineers are allowed to come in late if they have school drop-offs because there’s no longer an expectation that your life is meant to revolve around the record you’re making.”

She puts down her champagne to hug Lazar and head back to the party. “There’s a real buzz in the air around the women here tonight,” Marks says. “It bodes very well for the next generation.” The optimism is palpable, not just in what the producers have to say, but in their very presence. But for now, hope and frustration sit side-by-side.

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