KEY CHANGE

How the gender-balance tide is turning in the music world

It’s no secret that women are under-represented, numerically, in all corners of the music industry. From audio production to leadership, studies repeatedly find that women can face barriers to getting in and on that men don’t. One estimate puts the number of female luthiers as low as 50 to 100 worldwide. Scroll through trade association websites and luthier podcasts, and you sense that perhaps three in every 100 luthiers are women.

This may all be changing. Certainly, there are women working as designers and builders within majors such as Gibson and Taylor, there are female directors such as Maton’s Linda Kitchen in Australia, and there are teams of female staff running things at the likes of PRS. And with the example of pioneers such as Linda Manzer rolling on, there’s a sense that more women are picking up the pencil and power tools.

For guitar buyers, greater diversity at the workbench could mean greater design variety. The American Kathy Wingert has said she got into guitar making because she couldn’t find a big-sounding guitar that suited her relatively small stature. Models and data sets behind most product design – think crash-test dummies and smartphones – take an average man as the norm. Change the designer and your data set, and you start to change more than the mood music.