Music Victoria and the Victorian state government have teamed up for Cultivate, a brand-new leadership programme aimed at helping women in the music industry take the next step of their career.
Sarah Deborre is the Project Manager for Cultivate and says the programme is in part a response to statistics taken from the 2015 'Women In The Contemporary Music Industry' report. “One of the key things that stood out to me in that report was that we had over 300 women complete the survey and the respondents said they felt overlooked for workplace opportunities in the music industry,” Sarah says.
“The women in high-ranking senior positions within the music industry was quite low in comparison to those roles that are filled by men. The organisations Music Victoria looked into, only half of them had 50 per cent or more females in senior positions and there were several organisations that had no females in senior roles. Of all the senior positions available across the organisations that were looked into, only 28 per cent of them had women in senior roles.”
The Cultivate programme is designed to address the imbalance by empowering women, through education and mentorship, to reach their potential within the industry. “A programme like this is designed to help women that are on their journey to being in a leadership position,” Sarah says.
“We're looking for women that are already in a management or leadership role of some description, and we want to provide them with the leadership skills to advance to the next point in their career.”
Cultivate will be held for the first time next year, with just five positions available to begin with. “It's a really small pool of candidates, so we're going to be really selective,” Sarah says.
“Each participant will be teamed up with a mentor for a start... we're aiming to appeal to people of all ages for this programme, and mentors will be someone who is doing a similar job to that person but is more towards the end of their career and has substantial experience.”
As the Project Manager, Sarah says her primary goal is helping the candidates build strong pathways for career success.
“I already run a similar programme and for me my goal at the end of the day is to create support networks for people who are likeminded or working in similar fields,” she says.
“In this case, hopefully we'll bring together five women or people who identify as women that may not know each other, might be from all across the state who are at a similar points in their career.”
For its first offering of Cultivate, Sarah says the ideal candidate will be someone looking to make the most from the programme and what is has to offer.
“Some aspects of the programme will be dictated by our participant group, so I am excited to see the sorts of people that feel this is relevant for them,” she says.
