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PRS Foundation evaluates first five years of Women In Music fund
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 8 March 2017
Coinciding with International Women’s Day today, the PRS Foundation has released a report evaluating the impact of its Women In Music fund, five years after it was launched.
In 2011, the foundation discovered that only 16% of the projects it was funding involved female creators. Meanwhile other research found that only 13% of songwriters registered with PRS For Music were women.
Women In Music therefore attempted to redress the balance, and has gone some way to doing so. In the funding scheme’s first year, 86% of applicants had never applied to the PRS Foundation for funding before. Demand remains high, and the organisation has only been able to support 12% of the 1300 applications it has received.
“Based on everything we’ve learnt from this evaluation, there’s no doubt that our Women Make Music fund is still needed in the short term”, says PRS Foundation CEO Vanessa Reed in her introduction to the report. “Our commitment to developing it further with new partners forms part of this report’s recommendations. In the longer term, the success of this fund will be determined by how soon it becomes redundant”.
“At the Foundation we are setting ourselves the target of achieving a 50/50 balance of male-female music creator applicants by 2022”, she continues. “This report calls on government, fellow funding agencies and other industry partners to work with us on this goal by endorsing and investing in good practice, and positive action, like our Women Make Music fund, promoting role models for the next generation and improving working conditions for women in music. Only then can we be sure that a broader range of talent will be empowered to develop a career in writing music and that the music industry will better reflect the world around us”.