GENiE (Gender Equality Networks in Europe) is an online database of over 400 projects across 27 countries in Europe supporting with gender equality in music. The website is searchable by country or project type with the motivation of connecting people who run projects and helping women in the music industry find projects to get involved in. GENiE is less than a year old but has already had financial backing from SoundCloud.
We interviewed Grace Goodwin, founder of GENiE, to learn more about how this EDI activity manifests as her version of activism and how she uses her strong research skills to drive change. We also find out more about how her current PhD studies around regional gender inequality in the music industry, specifically in the Liverpool City Region, feed into her wider work in the diversity and equality space.
What are your motivations for addressing diversity and inclusion in your work?
I'm a researcher originally—that's my background—so my motivation within my work is using research and data to inform real-world scenarios. I want to create numbers and projects that go out into the real world and not just sit in a library, which I think can be a big problem with research. All of my work is around gender equality in music specifically, but I think a lot of what I'm doing applies to wider creative industries that have a general problem with gender equality anyway.
I had this idea that there are a lot of gender equality projects in music and I know a lot of people who run them but they're not very well connected. It's so overwhelming to try and engage with that type of thing if you don't know what you're doing. So I wanted to put it all in one place and create an easy-to-use website that I can send someone to if they want to find a project or a community to get involved with or if they want to learn a skill.
What do you believe are the risks of not addressing gender equality and gender diversity in the music industry?
I think it comes with all intersections really but with my work in gender, it's like we just create a homogenised culture where the same things are reproduced because of the same type of person. Even in the category of women, if the same type of woman is making the decisions across multiple companies, then you're not going to get the diversity of thought. You're also not going to get pushback and it's an incredibly good thing to have people pushing back against your ideas and people questioning why you do things the way you do.
With gender equality, specifically in music, it's definitely getting a lot better. However, there's still the issue with the other intersections around it, which is the biggest problem. For example, why is it that white women are the majority of those who have ended up in these positions of power? My wider research, outside of GENiE, is looking at regional inequalities in the music industry, so how where a woman is based can affect her career progression in music. I think that's an under-researched and misunderstood equality issue that we're not addressing very well at the moment either.
What are the essential elements of GENiE?
It's basically a massive spreadsheet of projects that was uploaded to make it into a website. I got SoundCloud on board as a partner because they like the aims and they were great because they gave me the money to make the website. They never asked for any ownership and just left me to it and I think this type of funding is rare.
GENiE is a really simple intervention that I think can have a big impact. Essentially, it's my version of activism. Some people get out on the streets and have placards and stuff but for me, my activism is through research because that's where I'm strongest. That's where I can have the most impact because governments listen to numbers and they listen to research.
For me, it's about finding the middle ground of making this type of thing accessible to the everyday person who doesn't want to read a 100,000-word thesis on why I think this issue is important but also the humility to accept that no one wants to read that other than your supervisor or some other very niche researchers in the same area.
Currently, I'm doing interviews for people who run projects and explaining to them what GENiE is and then trying to understand their motivations for setting up their projects and what they're lacking. I'm asking people things like, 'What do you need?', 'What do you think is going well for you?' - simple questions I don't think people who run these projects are being asked at the moment. These questions end up leading to a whole new realm of discussion and that's where I discover how I can support them. I can show them the funding models that might work for them, for example, or applications from other projects that have applied for the same funding.
What are your main goals? What are you hoping to achieve?
I launched with 300 projects and as of last week, it's up to 400 now. So, that's a goal I've already passed, which is really good. Now, it's about securing another round of funds and doing a research project around gender equality projects and music, because they're quite under-resourced, undervalued and under-researched as well.
With a lot of the people I've spoken to, the same common problems keep coming up. People are saying, 'We're underfunded', 'We're knowledge-rich', 'We're time poor', 'We can only get funded to this very specific type of activity'; 'We spend most of our time doing admin rather than delivering the projects we'd like to do'. But nobody has really collected these sorts of testimonies.
We always focus on the music makers, so I thought, well, what about the people who are helping the people become music makers who will facilitate that knowledge exchange? We seem to forget about them in that mix of industry and musicians. They're like that weird middle gap, which I don't think is being addressed very well at the moment.
What is the main problem that GENiE aims to address?
It's definitely a lack of connection. I was travelling around Europe and meeting people who were running projects and getting introduced to them because of my research. I met someone in Copenhagen who ran a really interesting project for women in music and I asked if they're aware of a Copenhagen-based producer course I know of. They had never heard of it, which is crazy to me because they're operating in the same sphere of supporting women in music, in the same city (that isn't particularly massive) and they're not aware of each other's work.
That's definitely a general theme, that across borders, people aren't working with each other enough. I think this is a real missed opportunity, especially across Europe with the funds you can get to work across borders. Collating this data through GENiE has made my work more of a community-focused activity as well, which is really nice.
How do you reach your target group - both the equality projects and the women in industry?
For me, it was about making GENiE a community project because I didn't want to become the gatekeeper of the information. I think the biggest thing GENiE has taught me so far is that I know a lot but I also know absolutely nothing about a lot of things too. I'm not the gender equality expert on German projects, for example, or the expert on how to run a DJ course - but I can connect you with those people who are and I can facilitate the knowledge.
I've tried to create a drive for people to upload their own projects and engage with GENiE in that way. Using Instagram is also great because visual media, I'd say, is the best way to reach people. Once I launched GENiE, the algorithm really helped as well - the more gender equality projects I followed on Instagram, the more were being suggested to me.
I've also found the best way to engage with people is by connecting through speaking to them because the minute I explain GENiE to them, it clicks really well. It's all about that facilitation of knowledge and access to information.
What have been the biggest challenges you've experienced so far?
The financial side of things was the biggest challenge for me in creating this resource. It was pure luck that I met someone who then essentially gave me money because it wasn't the case that I had pitched for it. I accidentally met someone at a party who liked my work and introduced me to someone and said, 'You should work with Grace, her research is really strong'. It was pure luck of the draw.
When looking at funding, I fell in between this strange niche of it not being me delivering a project for people, so private funding was the only way to do it. I was looking at some EU funding schemes, on the other hand, that GENiE would be a good fit for but I wasn't eligible for any of it because of Brexit. I think that's a problem with a lot of the projects on GENiE - finance is the biggest issue with everything because there's not enough money for anything in the music industry. Then, take that down to the niche of equality and diversity around gender and it gets even worse. A lack of knowledge is also a huge challenge as well.
What do you think makes GENiE successful?
The feedback I've been getting from people and hearing things like, 'Wow, I didn't know this existed' and 'I'm now speaking to people in Denmark I've never met who were also running this type of project'. It's not a hard thing for me to keep the website running but the big impact is in the knowledge that people take away from it to do their own thing. Success to me is them just connecting with other people and being able to send people to GENiE so they can find something for their specific niche rather than me having to sit down and do that research for them. Also, it’s the amplification of what's already out there - that has been one of the biggest things in terms of impact so far.
What are the next steps in GENiE’s development?
The next step is a yearly audit - seeing what we lose because even in the year that I was designing and making GENiE, I think we lost about 20 projects because they ran out of funding or stopped running for other specific reasons. I'm going to be very interested when I do my audit at the end of the year to see what's still operational and what's not - and finding out why. Was it money, time, or some other issues? There's definitely a general problem of women putting so much emotional labour into helping other women and the benefits not outweighing the costs, for example - and I don't think we see men doing that same type of work.
What advice or key learning would you share with other organisations considering delivering similar initiatives?
Know your why, why you're doing it? There's no point replicating what already exists. You have to look at the community you're trying to serve and reach out to them in the first place rather than just assuming you know what they want.