Women are woefully underrepresented in the DJ world: Here’s how Femme House and other collectives are filling the gap

On Sunday, dozens of aspiring DJs will gather at Soho House in Toronto for a crash course in the fundamentals of the craft, taught by two of Canada’s premier women turntablists, Joanna Magik and JayemKayem.

The DJ 101 Workshop — a free event designed specifically for female, female-identifying and non-binary participants — is being put on by the non-profit Femme House collective. It’s the second of two events being held in Canada, after a sold-out workshop in Calgary last weekend.

Over the course of the three-hour event, participants will learn the basicsof mixing, and receive expert advice on how to navigate a career as a DJ.

The enthusiasm for the sold-out workshop is unsurprising — despite the long-standing popularity of dance music, gender representation among professional DJs is dismal.

“The pipeline isn’t very full,” Magik, who is based in Calgary, told the Star in a Zoom call this week. “There aren’t a lot of women coming up behind us and they don’t have a lot of mentors to learn from.”

In 2020 and 2021, only 26.9 per cent of acts booked for electronic music festivals around the globe were women. Those numbers have increased slowly since 2010, but still represent a significant imbalance. However, in recent years, women-led collectives like FemmeHouse have cropped up across North America with the goal of lowering barriers to entry and tackling the gender gap.

Founded in 2019 by American DJs LP Giobbi and Hermixalot, Femme House has provided a broad range of programming and scholarships to amplify non-male DJs, and to elevate the voices of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ creators.

“House and techno started in Chicago, in Detroit, and comes from the Black community and the LGBTQ scene,” Magik said. “We want to honour the fact that the music that the masses are enjoying right now — Beyoncé and Drake’s house-inspired albums (‘Renaissance’ and ‘Honestly, Nevermind’) — came generally from these diverse, marginalized communities.”

Magik has been DJing for a decade and producing house music for the last three years. Since cutting her teeth in Calgary’s local scene, she’s played at Shambhala, Charivari Detroit and performed opening sets for the Calgary Flames.

Prior to her music career, she was a professional snowboarder, and later, an announcer at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. She credits her experience in the also-male-dominated world of extreme sports for helping her navigate the music scene.

“(As a woman) in the sports world, you have to be mindful of how you present yourself,” she explained. “Are you a fun party girl, or are you a serious sportsperson? There are a lot of parallels within the DJ world.”

Addressing the gender gap on the festival circuit and in local scenes

The gender disparity in electronic music is most glaring when it comes to major festivals.

Take, for example, the lineup for the upcoming VELD in Toronto. The largest electronic dance festival in Canada, the event has just seven women performers, two of which are part of a duo with a male DJ. That’s about 13 per cent women.

Magik says that kind of disparity on the festival circuit likely stems from a lack of diversity on the panels that curate these lineups. “Encouraging gatekeepers who are allies or having diverse voices on the panels will help that,” she said. “Which is probably the same for anything in the world. If your voice isn’t there, you can get missed.”

Indeed, a a useful case study cropped up last summer in the world of hip hop, when Rolling Loud Toronto announced a massive lineup that largely overlooked women rappers. Weeks later, Manifesto — a local Toronto festival led primarily by women of colour — announced a lineup that was 50 per cent women.

But local scenes also skew towards the boys.

ceeevs is an Edmonton-based DJ and the only woman in Night Vision, a collective of producers and DJs that also offers workshops and mentorship opportunities across the city.

“Being the only girl in the crew, it was always a bit nerve-wracking,” ceeevs, who started DJing six years ago, told the Star. “I definitely felt more pressure to perform well, like I had something to prove,” she said.

“The boys (in Night Vision) have always been very supportive,” she added, “but having close (female) friends of mine that were also DJing in the Alberta scene … made it way more welcoming. Representation obviously matters.”

JayemKayem, who is co-hosting Sunday’s workshop, is a well-known DJ in the Toronto scene. In addition to providing music for the Raptors and major corporate brands like Red Bull and Adidas, she’s also performed on some of the city’s biggest stages, from NXNE to Veld.

To mark International Women’s Day earlier this month, JayemKayem shared a post drawing attention to the disparity that also exists in Toronto’s local scene.

“I still see all-male lineups and non-inclusive programming in my immediate community,” she wrote. “And while a lot of this data is about music festivals, there are things to be learned and applied to micro-communities.”

Signs of improvement

ceeevs says that she already sees signs that the scene in Edmonton is becoming more inclusive. For example, there’s DollHaus, a female collective that “facilitates safe, inclusive & sexy dance spaces” across Alberta.

“They put on shows that are all women or femme artists on the bill, including the dancers, the vendors, the photographers, everything,” she explained. “And it’s such a different vibe playing with with all women — just the energy and camaraderie feels different than the lineups I usually play on.”

“It’s been an really important addition to our local scene here in Edmonton.”

She also points to Bass Coast Music and Arts Festival, a yearly event in Merritt, British Columbia, as prime example of a festival that is “meticulous” in its curation of a lineup that is reflective of the growing diversity of the electronic scene.

In Toronto, there’s also Intersessions, a project founded in 2016 by Chippy Nonstop that aims to encourage and support balanced gender representation in electronic music through workshops and parties that provide a safe and inclusive space for women and the LGBTQ+ community.

Earlier this week, Intersessions hosted a production workshop with DJs Mystmilano and Korea Town Acid at Apartment 200 in Toronto.

As for Magik, she hopes that the DJ 101 Workshop is just the beginning of Femme House programming in Canada.

“You can’t be what you can’t see,” Magik said. “That’s sort of my M.O. We want to inspire and show what is attainable to female or gender diverse individuals.”

DJ 101 Workshop, presented by FEMME HOUSE, takes place on Sunday, March 26 at Soho House Toronto.

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