Hen House is helping to close the gender gap in sound and media through opportunities, acknowledgment, and empowerment to female audio engineers, photographers, videographers, and musicians.
Problems:
The Annenberg Foundation conducted a study researching gender diversity within the music industry and uncovered some staggering numbers:
In the study (of 600 popular songs), females accounted for only 16.8% of artists in 2017.
The ratio of male to female producers across 300 popular songs in the study was 49:1. It's estimated that females account for only 5% of producers in Nashville.
Women account for only 17% of Billboard's Power 100 List, and only one woman made the Top 10.
The study showed that the top male songwriter (Max Martin) has 35 credits, while the top woman (Nicki Minaj) has 15 songwriting credits across 600 popular songs from 2012-2017.
Only 2% of all audio engineers are female and 20% of film producers are female. This lack of role models for young girls leads to less womxn working in these fields, creating an ongoing cycle.
Hen House exists to break that cycle by providing visibility, education, and opportunities to womxn in
sound and media.
"Hen" is a Swedish, genderless pronoun that represents our idealism of equality in the music industry that we are striving for through our three components of H.E.N.
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Highlight: We highlight talented womxn working in the music industry through our unique concerts entirely run and produced by our female crew of audio engineers, photographers, videographers, and musicians.
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Empower: We empower the next generation of womxn to pursue these fields by providing bite size tutorials in audio and video editing all created by people who look just like them.
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Navigate: We put on networking events to create a supportive and inclusive community/network for womxn to navigate and gain more opportunities.
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Ultimately, our goal is to close the gender gap in music production roles through opportunities, acknowledgment, and empowerment to females in the industry.
Meet The Team!
Claire Bidigare-Curtis
Founder | CEO
Claire is a freelance mixing engineer and producer, a professional ultimate frisbee player, and a dog mom. Originally from Granville, Ohio, she graduated from Belmont University in Audio Engineering. She produces EDM music/remixes for local Nashville artists, sound designs, and edits multiple different podcasts . From a young age she has been passionate about womxn’s rights’ and combined that with her love for audio and music through the making of Hen House.
Kaitlin is a freelance sound designer, audio engineer, theatre lover, and nature enthusiast now living in the Nashville area. She is originally from Butler, PA and moved to Nashville to attend Belmont University where she graduated with an audio engineering degree and theatre minor in 2019. Now post grad, Kaitlin is enjoying her time professionally sound designing and looking forward to growing with Hen House and continuing to support and empower womxn in production and music.
Kaitlin Barnett
Production Manager