Where are all the female music producers?

Kat George's 2016 article in Medium.com, Where are the Female Music Producers? mentions that since the creation of the Grammy's Producer of the Year award in 1974, only six women have ever been nominated for the "Producer of the Year - Non-Classical" category, none of which won the award. George references a piece of writing from the GRAMMY's website that mentions this same topic.

A few other interesting observations can be gleaned from the George's article.

1. Of the 40 years that this award has been around, all the nominations happened within a 14 year span - from 1989 to 2003.
2. With the exception of one, the women who have been nominated were all nominated for producing their own albums which they also wrote and performed on.
3. Of the women nominated, none of them were nominated soley on their own, but instead were nominated as part of a producer team comprised of men.

There is also mention of the sixth female nominee who was an the artist on the nominated record production - Lauren Christy.

Who is Lauren Christy...?

My mind wanders to women that I consider to be music producers but who are not ever credited with this title, a title that has been protected for men, much like "magician" or "genius."

Jessica Hopper's 2015 Pitchfork interview The Invisible Woman: A Conversation With Björk, echoes a specific instance of this issue. Bjork - a person that by definition is a music producer much like that of Diplo, Jay-Z, Dr. Dre, Danger Mouse, Parrell Williams - is often credited as "Artist" Performer," "Singer" - titles that are safe for placing on women. She, unlike much of the work from the aforementioned male artists, also authors all of her own music and the bulk of her production.

Similarly, following the breadcrumbs to Beyonce's producer credits, we can see that on her most recent and highly hailed release Lemonade, her name is stamped in the producer credits of all but one of the songs on her record. WHAT GIVES? I don't think I've ever heard her referred to as a Producer. But looking at the title and subtitle of this article, it is clear that the name recognition of her collaborators is being used to brand the record: "Here Are The Full Album Credits For Beyoncé’s LEMONADE: Diplo, Ezra Koenig, and James Blake make appearances, alongside breakout MVP MeLo-X." Do consumers only care about women being "Singers" and "Performers" and don't care to admire or congratulate women on their achievements as creative technicians or masterminds?

On the end of the spectrum is an artist like Grimes who is insinstant on not letting anyone touching her recordings until they go off to be mastered. This leaves me concerned about women feeling that the only way to maintain credit for their work is to be defiantly DIY to the point of burnout and eliminating opportunities for collaboration.

This leads me back to wondering, who is Lauren Christy? The woman who was nominated for Producer of the year in her work with Hillary duff and Liz Phair for The Matrix?

I search.

I see.

Not the the film, The Matrix?, The Matrix production team.

Why is this important to me?

While it is quite easy to structure this into a tidy “male/female” imbalance in the music industry, opening the scope not only reveals deeper problems that lead to more questions of cause and effect - chicken vs egg.

It is larger than music the music industry and larger than the gender binary. This divre doesn’t even scratch the topic of gender and sexual minorities in the music industry, an even bigger problem…