Why Nigeria has almost no female music producers

This is not to say there haven’t been women. Nigeria has been blessed with its fair share of successful women as top artists. Think Evi Edna Ogholi, Onyeka Onwenu, Oby Onyioha, Salawa Abeni Lijadu Tiwa Savage, Omawumi, Simi, Yemi Alade and more. Many great women have been musicians, thrilling fans and competing favourably at the highest level.

But behind the scenes, the story is different. When you leave the front-facing side of music and go to the back-end, you would discover the absence of women. Female producers, mixers, engineers, designers, and editors are few and far between, and the ones who do exist are consistently overlooked and discounted.

The Problem

A clear case for this is Nigeria’s most prestigious award ceremony, The Headies. At its last edition, no female producer made the cut. But that isn’t new. Since its inception in 2006, no female producer has ever been nominated for the award. In that time over 20 different men have been considered for the honours.

This doesn’t mean that female producers don’t exist or aren’t creating quality work in Nigeria. What these lack of numbers show is that there is a greater propensity of Nigerian women in music to lean into performance rather than production. But why is that?

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To find a female music producer is an experience that can be likened to meeting a unicorn. Even amongst music industry professionals, a female music producer is rare. More unfortunate is the fact that for the past 12 years, no trending pop record has ever been produced by a woman. The most recent time one stirred the waters, it was DJ Toxiq, who scored the speculative hit, ‘Ogede ti Pon’, performed by Pasuma Wonder, and housed on his experimental album “My World.” In fact, Toxiq produced the 15-track project, except for three records.

But why are women sorely lacking in music production?

Toxiq, speaking to Pulse, blames the propensity for the industry to ‘downgrade’ the efforts of women in production.

“As a female producer, people don’t normally recognize you when you make a beat. No one expects a girl to produce. I didn’t even expect myself to produce. That’s a major challenge, people not taking me seriously. They want you to do something free just to test you because you are a girl,” she says.

This is a real problem. While there have been advancements in the societal stereotyping of women and the type of jobs that they ‘expected’ to excel in, professionals in the music industry still treat back-end work as a man’s turf. Women who enter the world of production will have to overcome this barrier, working extra hard to prove themselves.

Dunnie, a young producer in Lagos, who discovered her passion for production in church, recently started producing professionally, says that while it may be a novelty to see a woman producing, it’s a harder job to sell.

“Well, people will mostly be attracted to you as a female producer, the next and harder step is getting them to work with you. But once they see that the beat is dope, they would always want to pay for them.” she says.

A close cousin of production is sound engineering. While there are a few women in production, there are less female sound engineers in Nigeria. The most prominent is singer Simi, who mixes all of her records herself. After discovering that she enjoyed working with sounds, she’s pursued it to a professional level. In 2016, Simi handled the mixing and mastering of Adekunle Gold’s eponymous debut album. She says that irrespective of her achievements as a sound engineer, people still look at her with wonder. She says that it isn’t ideal for people to consider gender in the music industry, rather than rate people based on what they can do.

“When I tell people that I am an engineer, they say, ‘oh I have never seen a woman do that.’ It’s not supposed to be about gender. It should be about if you are good at what you are doing. Society conditions women to embrace the visible aspects of the art, it’s a stereotype,” she says.

That attitude manifests itself in many blatant ways, in the music industry. It might just be what’s keeping women away from the console. A producer who refused to be named for this story once shared a story with me about a lady who tried to learn production at a popular studio in Lagos, along with a few other guys. She quit after two months because she felt she was treated like differently and “less than her male counterparts.”

There are similar experiences from other women who have shown an interest in the art. Women are discouraged from entering into music production because it is a man’s world. This reflects at the Headies, and every other award show.

Creating A New Generation Of Female Producers

For DJ Toxiq, she has accepted it as part of her reality and works twice as hard to be good enough for any level of work.

“I keep working hard, keep doing my best to the fullest. I still read, stay up all night for research. I also have my team, who help with quality control for my beats. I do these to ensure that my work matches the standard of songs that are out there today,” she says.

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Encouraging women towards music production is important. Production is a creative effort, where people link up sounds together and push the boundary of human enjoyment, stimulation and connectivity via sounds. People tend to associate the ability to think creatively with stereotypical masculine qualities, according to a 2015 research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings suggest that the work and achievements of men tend to be evaluated as more creative than similar work and achievements produced by women.

This needs to change, most importantly from childhood. Women should be encouraged as early as possible to pursue merit in skill (just like we do for boys), rather than being admired and appreciated for their physical qualities. As they grow, for those drawn to the art, they can begin to evaluate and be encouraged to chase other aspects of the music, away from being at the centre of the lights camera and action. That way, we can build a generation of young Nigerian female producers, mixers, engineers, designers, and editors.