Women face underrepresentation across the music industries and are more likely than men to take career breaks for longer periods of time.

Musicians, composers, artist-managers, technical workers and CEOs of music businesses have historically been male-dominated professions. As the Triple J Hack team reported, the gender gap is shifting among musicians, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

The careers of gender non-conforming (GNC) music industry workers are still largely absent from public discussion and research altogether. What we do know is that the barriers that many women and GNC people face in entering the music industries continue after they’ve taken a career break. Our research team aims to help women and GNC people get back into the music workforce.

The Encore project was an RMIT University initiative to help facilitate the re-entry of women and GNC people into the music workforce.

The project ran three focus groups with other people experiencing a similar career situation. These focus group sessions took place in Melbourne and Geelong. Each group explored the experiences of different stages of re-entry into the music industries.

The groups included:

• Women & GNC people who have returned to the music industry

• Women & GNC people attempting to return to the music industry

• Women & GNC people anticipating breaks from the music industry

These focus groups aimed to ensure that the training materials that were developed by the ENCORE project considered a diversity of pathways, challenges and experiences that women and gender non-conforming people experience in taking a break from and re-entering the music industries.