February | 2016 | Women's Radio in Europe Network (WREN)

The group Women in Sound/Women on Sound is hosting its annual forum on 22 April, Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts.

Educating Girls in Sound

Submission deadline February 8th, notification of selection February 15th.

WISWOS 2016 will take place at the Peter Scott Gallery at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts. This years WISWOS event will focus on education. The previous very successful event at Lancaster in 2015 exhibited the excellent and varied work being done by women in many areas of sound, but also made clear their lack of visibility to the young. Despite the long and effective history of women working in and on sound, the numbers involved have not risen. What impact does the current education system have on young girls to deter them from moving into the fields of science, technology, the arts and engineering with sound? How can it be improved?

Key questions we wish to explore in the Forum are:

What happens in the music/sound tech classroom?
At what point do we see the drop from equal interest to little interest?
What initiatives already exist that do encourage girls to engage?
What can we do, and should we do it or not?

Full details here.

Gendered divisions of labour are common in the history of radio production (and are one of the things groups like the Sound Women are seeking to address.) It has happened quite regularly that once a technical task (such as sound technician) becomes a domain open to women, it is also devalued – or vice versa.

In discussion today with Andras Simongati-Farquhar, an MA student at the Insitute of Sonology in the Hague , he pointed out that such a phenomenon also seems to have occurred in the Soviet Union’s radio jamming activities. This is mentioned in a section of a documentary by Rimantas Pleikys, former Minister for Communications and Informatics of Lithuania, called The Empire of Noise about Soviet radio jamming. While transmitting jamming signals was the domain of the men, it was largely a corps of women who monitored frequencies for the effects of jamming. Check out the section of the documentary here: