'If You Want To Be Somewhere, You've Got To Occupy It'

The lack of women engineers and producers in music is not news. Historically, the recording studio has rarely seen women outside of the reception area or, in the case of a performance venue, in the box office. And as a 2012 report in The Journal on the Art of Record Production shows, these same conversations about gender imbalance in music production have been happening over and over for decades — with little progress being made. While these conversations keep happening, the report says, there is less talk about why "music production in the popular music industry has, for most of its history ... been a male reality" — and what women's experiences in this industry are actually like.

"When I started in 1986, it was at least four or five years until I saw another woman doing the same job," says Karrie Keyes, who has been Pearl Jam's monitor engineer for over 25 years. "Then it was another four or five years before I saw another one. I had no role models. I had no input about people that worked on live sound in concerts."

Keyes is the executive director of , a non-profit organization she co-founded in 2013 with a mission of "empowering