I appreciate the effort here.  I note, though, that your spreadsheet assumes a gender binary.  (A significant part of the "larks and robins" drive is to remove the necessity of a gender binary.)  At the very least, it would be good to have a column for "Other"  or "Non-binary".

(It would be somewhat useful but intrusive and difficult to maintain gender-presentation and gender-identification stats.)

-- Alan (a cis-het male who's been on staff at Queer Contra weekend)

Announcing that two brand new resources that could be really helpful to organizers of music and dance camps, festivals and events are in the first week of their development. 

womenfolk spreadsheet

The first actually started in 2015 when I compiled a small set of information on instructor gender balance at camps. All wanted to see was the ratio of men to women instructors and musicians at a range of camps. I plopped them into a simple spreadsheet and exported the results (see image below.) My initial sample yielded results from good to abysmal, but only included one year for each even, so didn’t account for any anomalies Responses from people I showed it to were decidedly lukewarm, so I put it away for a couple of years. But this week another idea was put out that dovetailed nicely with my little spreadsheet, so I hauled it out of the mothballs and made it available online. 

As it works now, I and a volunteer or two search out info from websites and put it in manually. However my current thinking is that it would be amazing if organizations would self-audit and either send me the results or add them directly to the spreadsheets. I just got my first self-entered stats from Crispin at CDSS (Thank you!) and would love to get more. While it’s easy to think of this as shaming to get organizations to do better, I would rather it was used to as a tool to see how organizations are doing better over time, or to tap the organizations who are doing well for more information on how they get such great results. It could also open up a larger conversation on why hiring for gender equality may not always be the ultimate goal and the other kinds of hiring considerations people are juggling.

A couple of things to know:

For now I’m not collecting information on ethnicity for this sheet.

 

If gender identity is unknown we list total staff members and only categorize the ones that are clearly one gender or the other as they choose to identify. Any time we aren’t sure, or a staff member has clearly indicated they don’t want to be counted, we leave them out of the category counts. That means we won’t always add up to 100%, but that also gives us important information about how gender identity could be influencing (or not influencing) hiring practices. I want to keep it simple without leaving anyone out!

 

We are not including unpaid staff or “service staff” (like child care providers, cooks etc.). We really want to get a sense of the way different camps and weekends think about hiring music and dance instructors and performers specifically. 

The current document is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MjDRL3ZkHfJAsyk1p-QFTPiqVsFtiqZKEMxVhFMEqw0/edit?usp=sharing 

I left the 2015/16 info attached to it so you can see what results I came up with then.

If you want to enter your info, shoot me an email and I will add you in.  ssgowan@gmail.com

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The second even more super-exciting resource is being spearheaded by A’yen Tran from Brooklyn.

Women/Black/Indigenous/non-white/LGBTQIA Music Instructor Nominee Directory

A form to nominate excellent banjo, fiddle, guitar, bass, mandolin, uke, vocal, music history and other musical teachers. This form aims to collect nominees who can be referred as music teachers with the goal of increasing representation for women, people of color and gender diversity in music camps and other musical learning opportunities. This form was created on Oct 8, 2019 by A'yen Tran with the intention of making it publicly available, particularly to music camp directors. Please feel free to self-nominate!

This will be an incredible resource for organizers to find underrepresented performers and teachers and will also be a great way for organizers to share the wealth around. Whether you know instructors who should be on this list, or want to hire more underrepresented teachers, I encourage you to take a look at both this one and the womenfolk spreadsheet and participate, if you can.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScMhZzZpzfbMkTVqSUHyFJ5YgOxxI6-EH8Gqrynk8hUsNV4qg/viewform

Thanks,

Sarah Gowan

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