A recent meeting of professional women in the Audio Visual sector of the EU (held in Spain at Santiago de Compostela) decided after three days of intensive debate to come up with the following conclusions:

“The very low percentage of women in key-jobs of the European audiovisual sector is unfair because it leaves an important part of the European population voiceless. It wastes talent, energy and experience both behind and in front of the camera, and it seriously affects the audiovisual media content which generates our image of the world.

This situation undermines the diversity and cultural pluralism of the democratic system we all want to achieve.

To solve this serious imbalance we will start by establishing a commission that will take responsibility for the creation of a European Network of Women in the Audiovisual world. This network will constitute a digital platform that will be used to:

a. Contain a database of all the professional women in the sector
b. Exchange information, experiences and projects
c. Create an employment board
d. Forge and consolidate an industry market.”

http://www.cimamujerescineastas.es/htm/comunicacion/noticias

Whilst this is just one sector of the Audio Visual Industry it did prompt me to think about the AV market in general – are women under-represented here? Clearly it is a male dominated industry – is that because it’s high tech and therefore men are more likely to graviate towards anything technical – or am I stereotyping there? Probably, but still true I think.

Women are more likely to be prevalent in the sales side of the industry rather than in engineering. Certainly recent jobs we have advertised for AV Project Managers and AV Engineers have prompted only CVs from men whilst sales vacancy roles are split about 80% male with just 20% female applicants.

IT seems to have more women on the technical side though – we recently placed a woman in an IT Project Manager role – so why the difference?

I definitely don’t have the answers but I would be interested to hear from others in the industry as to why they think it’s so and can we change the perception of a male dominated industry – or don’t we care as long as we have the best people for the job in hand.

Your comments are always appreciated.