DATA SIM shows the women qualification on the market

By Thiago Ney

The Brazilian music market is made up of qualified women. A third of those who work in the sector have a degree. This is one of the findings of DATA SIM, from the survey Women in the Brazilian Music Industry: Obstacles, Opportunities and Perspectives.

The survey was conducted in the first half of the year with a sam-ple of 612 women in the Brazilian music market. It’s aligned with the study “Women in the US Music Industry: Obstacles and Op-portunities”, produced by Berklee College of Music and Women in Music.

In Brazil, 38.3% of respondents have a university degree, while 18.3% say they have completed postgradu-ate studies.

DATA SIM Director Dani Ribas says the re-search “busts myths with numbers”, challenging the misperception held by many key industry stakeholders. They believe that “there is no female talent in certain professional areas or musical styles”.

“The inequalities” says Dani Ribas, “are not due to the lack of female talent. They happen because us women do not have the same opportunities as men when entering the job market and building a career in the music industry. The first steps towards a less uneven market with more opportunities for everyone are: publishing these results, making the music market aware of entry barriers, and giving female professionals increased visibility. The responsibility for building a more equal market lies with everyone, not just women”.

The majority of these women are based in the Southeastern of Brazil: 71.2%. Then comes the Northeast (11.9%), the South (11.1%), the Midwest (4.1%) and the North (1.6%).

When they were asked about their own ethnicity, 70.3% said they were white; 15% declared themselves as brown; 10.9% identified as black women and 2.8% said they were yellow.

Geographic and ethnic data demonstrates that women in the Brazilian music market are still mostly concentrated in a single region, and white people are still predominant.

The USA study reveals that 61% of respondents consider the development or the interruption of their careers a decisive factor when having children. Data collected by the DATA SIM survey follows this trend.

In the Brazilian market, women are predominantly single (62.3%) and have no children (76.5%). This suggests that they may choose not to marry / have children in order to have a professional life in music. In addition, 80.7% of music workers in Brazil are between 19 and 40 years old.

One of the surveys already carried out by DATA SIM gathered information about the music market in São Paulo. It revealed that the majority of small establishments are concentrated in the West side of the city.

The full findings of the survey Women in the Music Industry in Brazil: Obstacles, Opportunities and Perspectives will be presented at this edition of SIM São Paulo.

DATA SIM is SIM São Paulo’s data management and research hub for the music market. It conducts:

Case studies with original primary data; Benchmarking between existing research in Brazil and worldwide, in order to collect secondary data; It partners with other research institutes; It devises quantitative and qualitative methods in order to cater for the diversity of issues in the creative economy.