‘This felt more like a conversation’: challenging gender norms in electronic music production through alternative education programs

ABSTRACT This article argues that problematic gender norms in electronic music contexts – namely, their association with masculinity and overrepresentation by cis men – can be subverted through alternative education methods. We use the case study of the Electronic Music Accelerator (EMA) program, run by youth organization The Push in Melbourne, Australia, to illustrate this. Specifically, we evaluate strategies used in the EMA program to teach Ableton and related skills on building electronic music production careers. The EMA s program was designed to increase the numbers of women and gender non-conforming or gender diverse people involved in electronic music production, in response to evidence that these groups continue to be underrepresented in this area. We focus on how so-called soft skills, as opposed to the strictly technical skills normally the main focus in an Ableton course, were taught in this program. In the EMA, rather than insisting that the participants take up a ‘masculine’ attitude to adapt to the existing electronic music scene that is dominated by men, the course presented ways of working with, and even reclaiming, traits perceived as feminine, such as humility and community-mindedness. This approach offers possibilities for reconfiguring expectations in electronic music spaces.


Introduction
Electronic music production discourses and practices have historically been associated with masculinity and the overrepresentation of cis men compared with other genders.While there have been many figures in electronic music who have bucked these norms since the inception of electronic music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuryand alternative histories written about such figures -cis men continue to dominate electronic music production in everyday settings.With a growth in awareness of gender issues around the world, however, musicians, producers and organizations are making efforts to subvert these exclusionary gender norms.This article addresses one such effort, in the case of the Electronic Music Accelerator (EMA) programme, run by youth does not stop at encouraging a gender diverse group of people to learn how to produce, but means breaking with the norms of competitive and individualistic modes of sociality and replacing them with collaborative ones, where 'failure' or 'mistakes' are seen as generative and essential building blocks of creative work.

Gender in electronic music
Across genres, women face barriers to full participation in music making and struggle to stake claim to authorship of music.This begins young, which makes it a pernicious challenge to undo in adult spaces (Armstrong 2011;Green 1997).Informal play, trial and error, risk and experimentation are required for a willingness to improvise, play or sing music by ear in social settings, which includes spaces of electronic music production.These tend to be activities that parents encourage their young boys to do.By contrast, girls are pushed to play it safe, choosing to take up more formal pathways to music learning and participation (see Green 1997).The degree to which music is deemed of high value or quality is underscored by prejudices about gender that are deeply held and difficult to challenge (Leonard 2007).Social and cultural studies of music show that music scenes are homosocial 2 (Straw 1997), which works to exclude women in a variety of ways (Bayton 2006; Strong andRaine 2019).Such studies also show that women tend not to be as commercially successful as men in music (Lafrance, Worcester, and Burns 2011).This reinforces the broader societal problem of the gender pay gap, which stretches across all areas of work.In addition, women pursuing music tend to have careers that do not last as long (Lieb 2013), and are not remembered in the music 'canon' to the same extent as men (Strong 2014).
In Australia, studies and programmes have worked towards understanding and correcting this disparity (Strong andCannizzo 2017; Cooper, Coles, andHanna-Osborne 2017), along with grassroots organizations that have promoted and supported women and gender diverse artists and sought to create safe spaces for them to work and perform.This has led to improvement in women's participation in some music industries (McCormack 2019).At the same time, there has been a growing awareness of how people with disabilities, people of colour, First Nations people, members of the LGBTQI+ community and gender diverse people are also often marginalized, and how the intersections of such identity markers can substantially inhibit participation in music making.There is also an understanding that quotas and ratios cannot be the singular answer to what is a larger sociocultural problem (Werner, Gadir, and de Boise 2020).Evidence of this can be found in the fact that countries such as Norway and Sweden, which have the ideal of gender equality entrenched in their legal systems enforced through such policies as strict gender quotas, are not free from gender problems.This applies to music and other creative industries, including DJ-based or electronic music, which often operates outside the insulation of public institutions with waged employees, and which is often viewed by the State as entertainment rather than art (Gadir 2023;McRobbie 2016;Reitsamer 2011;Werner, Gadir, and de Boise 2020).When it comes to electronic music, there is an additional hurdle: electronic music technologies are largely seen as the domain of cis men, and the use of machines in music is perceived as an intrinsically male area of expertise.In the popular imagination, the figure of the music producer is almost always a cis man.Production and the related work of DJing is referred to by Gavanas and Reitsamer (2013) as a 'male-coded space,' because other genders are not typically granted the same degree or ease of access.The effect of this domination is that gender-related prejudice, discrimination, and exclusionary practices are commonplace.While gender discrimination has become less acceptable in musical communities in recent years, fuelled by awareness raising and higher levels of mainstream media attention than in the past (see for example McCormack 2019;Strong and Morris 2016), women continue to be excluded, and even when included, are often treated poorly in music production and studio environments (see Gadir 2023;Reddington 2018).The prejudice runs deeper than the domination of men in numbers or acts of exclusion in the studio.It is a longstanding assumption that technological and technical skills (not only in music) are masculine attributes (Armstrong 2011;Doubleday 2008;Gavanas and Reitsamer 2013).The associations between electronic music and masculinity have historical precedents and still appear in the technical vocabularies now in common use (Rodgers 2010).In addition, noise or loudness, with which electronic music is often associated, has a historical tie to masculinity -an attachment that can be traced back to the military roots of the loudspeaker in the early 20 th century and explicit marketing to men by technology corporations after World War II (Rodgers 2010).Even sonic aesthetics are often divided by fans and producers of electronic music into more 'intrinsically' feminine or masculine qualities, with a clear association between 'low' (unsophisticated) art qualities and so-called feminine sounds (Gadir 2016(Gadir , 2017)).While there are signs of a decreasing tolerance to such attitudes, gender barriers to music production persist.Organizations that invest energies and finances into undoing over 100 years of gendering are part of a large-scale and global call-to-action propelled by the attention to such issues that campaigns such as #MeToo have contributed to.
Music education is a highly feminized workforce, and one of the historically earliest types of music work where women have been encouraged to be in the foreground (Howe 2009).This is due to the dominance of women in caring roles, especially of children, and like other feminized labour, such work is often seen as lower-status, or something that so-called failed musicians do (see Gould 1992).Within the feminized profession of music education, gender prejudice and discrimination against girls and women nevertheless takes place.It manifests in a particular way with respect to music technologies, ranging from the oldest acoustic instruments to contemporary electronic music technologies, and ranging from pre-school to higher education (Armstrong 2011;Bergstrøm 2021;Green 1997;Marshall and Shibazaki 2013).There has been an increased institutionalization and specialization, in educational contexts, of work such as music production and sound design, with colleges and universities the world over offering formal qualifications in the form of diplomas and degrees (Born and Devine 2015).While a more formal context might seem to lend itself to encouraging more women to take such qualifications, overall, it appears that technology-oriented music degrees remain dominated by men.In one study of music degree enrolments in the UK, it is particularly striking that the only music degrees where the majority of enrolments are male are those where music technology use -such as production, engineering and sound design -are at the foreground (Born and Devine 2015).Numerous studies have found that the environments in these classes, which tend to be skewed towards masculine forms of sociality and learning, are often intimidating and exclusionary for women and gender diverse students (Davies 2019;Hopkins and Berkers 2019).If one goal is to increase the numbers of women and gender diverse people attending such classes, it is therefore important to consider how music technology learning environments might be made more welcoming to them.
As shown above, there has been a significant amount of research over recent decades about music technology, gender and music education.However, many of the issues articulated as early as the 1990s remain.It is therefore unsurprising that electronic music production in the third decade of the 21st century continues to be a space that is not always welcoming for women and gender diverse people.As will be described below, we see the EMA programme as a small-scale but important intervention that has sought alternative models of teaching music production.

Research methods
The authors were engaged by the Push to undertake an evaluation of the programme. 3Data were collected through a mixed-methods approach using three data collection techniques.The first of these was two online surveys, sent to all 43 participants before and after the EMA classes took place.Twenty-six completed surveys were received before the classes, and nineteen post-class surveys were completed.The surveys gathered data on respondents' self-assessed levels of competence with electronic music production before and after the course, elements relating to creativity, safety, willingness to experiment, insight, networks and opportunity, as well as what kinds of activities, if any, have resulted from participation in the programme. 4While the surveys provide data that show that the course met the expectations of participants and increased their skills and confidence the quantitative data will not be the main focus of this paper.Instead, we will refer more to the surveys' open-ended qualitative data, which prompted for thoughts from respondents on expectations of the course and possible improvements.
The second data collection method consisted of interviews on experiences in the programme with six participants who volunteered to take part in interviews after the invitation to do this was extended to all participants, 5 as well as with EMA instructor Beatrice Lewis (referred to as Bea by participants), after the completion of the second term.These interviews were semi-structured in nature, lasting 30 minutes each on average, and were conducted over Zoom.Participants were asked to describe their experiences in the programme, including what they liked and disliked, what they found helped them learn, what suggestions they would make for future versions of the programme, and whether they had any other comments to make.Interviews were transcribed and a thematic analysis using coding was undertaken to identify the key data (Roulston 2010).Finally, author [1] observed seven classes in the second term, where there were 26 participants in total.The researcher was a focused witness (Tracy 2020, 133) in these classes, being introduced to the students with an explanation as to her presence as a researcher but beyond this not taking part or having input into the sessions beyond some social conversation with Bea or the students.Detailed notes were taken during these classes on the format of the lessons, student responses, and interactions between the instructor and students.A thematic analysis of these notes were undertaken after interviews were coded, with the themes identified in interviews being used to guide the coding process, but focus also being put on identifying further themes that may not have emerged in interviews.This mixed-methods approach has provided a multi-faceted view of the programme and its impacts on the participants, ensuring that they have been given an opportunity to express in their own words what their experiences were while also giving researchers an on-the-ground perspective of the format and activities in classes (Babbie 2011, 315).

Confidence, safety and comfort
This section will use the concepts of confidence, safety and comfort to illustrate how an alternative ethos of music making is cultivated in the Electronic Music Accelerator through the overarching 'feel of the classrooms'.
As Bea articulated in her interview, challenges to confidence, safety and comfort are a significant motivator for her chosen methods of teaching music production: That was my most planned kind of dynamic, the actual feeling of the classrooms.And because I guess I have spent a lot of time in spaces in electronic music where I feel veryit's not unwelcome, but like I'm not really meant to be there.So I was -the main thing that I wanted to have as the underlying dynamic of the classrooms is that you belong there, wherever you're at in your learning process is totally fine and legitimate and -there's a better word, like wherever you're at in your learning process is the right -it's exactly where you're meant to be.And it's like trying to create a safe and comfortable and confident place for learning because I think in electronic music, there's not really that culture.It's not as warm and caring and open and it can be quite competitive or quite othering -quite discriminative of -not so much now, it's getting better, but my experience growing up, it was quite challenging to be a part of.And so, yeah, I wanted to create just a little something on the side that was none of that, yeah.
Confidence, safety and comfort are also addressed in research on women and gender diverse people's engagement with music.This research often argues that one of the main barriers to success for women and gender diverse people is a lack of confidence.What this means in real terms is two things.First, in learning environments, girls are observed hesitating to play in front of others, thereby losing opportunities to practice and gain feedback.Second, when trying to establish careers, women do not promote themselves and their work as aggressively as men, actively downplaying their skills or turning down opportunities that men at the same skill level would take up.Edmonds (2019, 79) notes that 'this confidence talk is troubling for many reasons, not least of which because of the way it reinforces more intractable beliefs about women and creative success.'This emphasis on confidence also results in a highly individualized focus, where the onus is on women not only to display confidence, but also to step up into leadership roles to provide missing role models and mentoring for other women.Using the work of Gill and Orgad, Edmonds (2019, 78) notes that women's lack of confidence is framed as ideally being 'self-corrected through proper application of self-improvement programmes [that] encourage women to see themselves as "part of the problem"' and discourages a focus on structural issues.However, other research has looked at how success is not simply a matter of somehow learning or displaying confidence; social expectations around women's behaviour mean that such assertions can be read as aggression and/or be seen as 'unfeminine', actually working against women (Cannizzo and Strong 2019).
It was observed that the issue of confidence arose in the EMA sessions in a variety of ways, resulting in some novel responses that moved beyond simply exhorting the students to 'be more confident' or to 'lean in'.The focus was not on how the participants felt about what they were producing or on trying to increase their feelings of confidence.Rather, Bea gave participants ways to put their feelings to one side in order to continue to create, with no expectations about what form this creation might take.For example, on one occasion, when Bea regularly asked participants to play what they had been working on, a number of the participants accompanied their examples with apologies for the work, or comments about their own lack of ability and shortcomings at Ableton.Bea's response to this was not to address anything about the qualities of the participants, or to engage in discussion about whether they might be 'good' or 'bad' at anything, but to refocus attention on the work and the processes around creating it.She told the students that it is a mistake to judge their work too soon, and that trying different approaches and seeing how they play out is how to learn what will ultimately work; if something happens along the way that is discarded, this was not 'bad' or a failure on the part of the producer, but a part of the process.
At times, it was observed that Bea also exposed her own feelings of vulnerability or inadequacy regarding her own work, which served to normalize such feelings within the creative process and show how students can deal with them.Bea and guest teachers demonstrated live composition in front of the students, something she admitted to feeling nervous about.Talking the students through this process revealed certain insecurities or embarrassments that Bea herself had about what she produced in real time.However, she also modelled methods of continuing to work through this.For example, Bea acknowledged that certain things might not be working as she hoped, but continued to experiment and make changes until it was more to her satisfaction.In addition to this, Bea and some of the guests were upfront about their own feelings of inadequacy and occasional embarrassment at struggling with technology or producing imperfect work.Bea made a point of saying that such feelings are common in the industry, mentioning some high-profile musicians she has worked with who have expressed such sentiments to her.
On another occasion, Bea and a guest attempted to demonstrate one technique to the students and discovered that they could not do it.They spent 10 to 15 minutes troubleshooting the problem, including asking the students for ideas and help, before arriving at a solution.This process was accompanied by some negative self-talk, showing embarrassment and frustration with their own limitations, but the negativity was never given much space and the search for a solution was more clearly prioritized.Through this, the students were shown how to find technical solutions to issues they encountered with the software and were given a model for how to work through difficult emotions they might encounter during such processes.
In interviews, students discuss how negative emotions and a lack of confidence about their work had been reframed in positive ways, resulting in increased engagement with their own learning: This interviewee's reference to the unimportance of being 'good or not' suggests that they have deprioritised confidence as it is normally framed, instead focusing on the creative process.Knowing that other people also 'struggle' is central to their ability to do this.
Similarly, it was observed that the way that EMA classes were structured around student work and students' questions also helped to reframe their ideas about confidence.Students were encouraged to share their work with the class, usually as a starting point to the session.Not all students chose to do this, and while all students were given an opportunity to do so, there was no pressure on anyone to share if they were not comfortable.Bea would use issues that the students were encountering with their compositions to explain key concepts or processes to the class.This meant that what was covered in any given class was determined by the problems and questions that students had, and was also directly applied to what they were working on and what they were struggling with, as noted by interviewees: For me, personally, learning on YouTube, I get distracted really easily when I'm not in a work environment.And it's really hard to tell whether you're doing it right when you're learning.When you have a second opinion, like [Bea], just saying, 'That sounds almost like off pitch.It just sounds a bit pitchy there.Maybe just tweak it down or something like that.'I think it's really important to just have that, I guess confirmation that you're doing it right.Because the last thing I want to do is to adopt a bad habit when I'm producing.And never know about it until later on.Because you always want to start with the greatest foundation when you're learning anything music related.You always want to have the right technique and stuff like that.And when you learn by yourself it's really difficult to see whether -for some people it works out really well.But for me I get really nervous and anxious whether I'm doing it right.And there is a lot of self-doubt associated with learning by myself.I think those sessions were super, super important for me as a student.(Interview 2) In this example, confidence building is associated with knowing that they are in an environment where mistakes are corrected, in a constructive way.
Other interviewees also raised the importance of having a trusted person to ask questions of.As in the above example, the below interviewee highlighted the difference between this and solitary learning using tools such as YouTube, which they saw as having implicitly gendered objects made by men, presumably for men: I used to try and teach myself through YouTube tutorials, but it's just like a lot of, I don't know, very obnoxious -sometimes obnoxious men doing the YouTube tutorials.There's not very many back-to-basics, in that way -but Bea was really well -good at -great at explaining things, and just made it really fun and simple.(Interview 3) And that was probably one of the best things, was actually having someone in the room to be like, 'Hey, why?'[. ..]Rather than just watching like through YouTube tutorials which are often run by men that just kind of don't make as much sense or are a lot harder to follow, I think.(Interview 1) The observations that interviewees made about the EMA lessons' contrast with masculinized YouTube videos was not the only way that they connected their comfort and safety with the gendered nature of the classes.The interviewees contrasted the environment in the EMA with experiences from other music learning environments that were run or dominated by men, noting the ways they had felt intimidated or excluded in those spaces.For some interviewees, these experiences involved active discrimination and feeling unsafe: I think as a woman in music, every woman in music and every woman or basically non-male will have had bad experiences with men regardless of if it's right in their conscious mind or if it's just in their subconscious, statistically speaking.And if you're in a space where, to produce good work, you have to be vulnerable and you have to feel safe and then to get the most out of it you have to feel like you can ask questions, having men, cis straight men, there, I think without you even realising, does create a filter and can change the energy of a space.Because generally, especially in music, there's a lot of ego and arrogance and not to say that's a generalisation but it's just a fact that a lot of men in music have behaved poorly and do behave poorly.So, I think it's just nice to -I don't think I've had a really bad experience where I felt unsafe around a woman, a trans or a gender-nonconforming person in music, in being in the industry for five years now.But I've felt unsafe around men hundreds of times.(Interview 6) The shift in this quote between men making a space less comfortable for creative activities ('ego and arrogance') and men being the source of 'bad experiences' and a more general feeling of not being safe ('behaving poorly') hints at the multiple dimensions of how music spaces are policed.Women and gender diverse people can be simply made to feel uncomfortable, but it is also not uncommon for them to be actively harassed or assaulted (Raising Their Voices 2022).The connection between not having to worry about this and doing 'good work' suggests that the presence of men not only impacts other genders participation, but may also impact the quality of their work.
Other participants found that in environments dominated by cis men, knowledge was hard to access, and noted the direct contrast between those environments and the EMA: I think it did definitely impact my comfort in that [EMA] environment where I was learning.I felt extremely supported and understood.I have sought out a lot of information and learning from males while I've been DJing, and it's super intimidating a lot of the time.A lot of the people I interact with are quite vague, they're not very willing to engage with me or help me up-skill in any way.It's really clawing for information.But this was a completely different experience, where I was uplifted and encouraged.And as I said, I've networked to the point where I'm running events with girls, and I've got people who are mixing on my platform now.It's just a totally different experience to other social groups where I have been supported but -yeah, less so, I guess?(Interview 5) Interviewees connected the sense of having a 'safe space' 6 at the EMA with both the presence of people like themselves, which prevented the types of issues noted above, and the ways in which the instructor created a learning environment that contrasted with the more masculine top-down, competitive or authority-focused approaches they had encountered before: I think probably what was the unique feeling was that no one was necessarily in charge, but Beatrice was working alongside you, and that's probably where you might have more of a hierarchical environment (. ..) it just felt like she was just like one of us and she was just there to help and we could learn from her just like she could learn from us.That was probably the most unique thing about it, whereas other people have a person up the front of the room who's always in control and is always telling you what to learn, she was kind of guiding you but it felt like she was a friend as well, which again, created that safe space (Interview 1) As the above quote shows, participants perceived an ability to connect with the teacher as a guide, mentor, or even peer, rather than as someone 'in control'.They also perceived the ease with which such connections happened between themselves and other students in the course as fostering a shared sense of identity, which helped to create the 'safe space' being referred to: We all had each other's Instagram straight away.We were all thinking about how we could work together, and it was just kind of -everyone just had this real up-for-it kind of nature that you might not have if it was for the broader community or for a broader range of people.It was probably because of our age and also because of our shared kind of identity, various gender identity experiences.But yeah, that was really precious and just the way that we supported each other and all that kind of stuff, you often imagine happening [in] women's spaces and non-male spaces as well.There was just a real nice comradery and support of each other and yeah, we found that the whole way through, I think.(Interview 1) In an industry where networks are often foundational in finding opportunities (Christopherson 2009) fostering these connections has the potential to shape industry practices as this cohort establishes careers with an understanding of how identity can impact the ability to participate The ways spaces of music making are gendered can also affect who feels that they can participate in them.For example, in her study of open mic nights, Martin (2019) explored how open nights held in pubs -marked out as masculine spaces -tended to be dominated by men, whereas open mics held in alternative venues such as community halls, which could be reconfigured to provide different forms of sociality than the pub (for example, through centring food sharing, providing child friendly spaces or being held at more family-friendly times), were more likely to attract women performers.Similarly, it was observed that the set-up at the Push facilities contrasted with the typical types of environments participants had experienced electronic music education previously.The facilities where the EMA sessions were held are a series of open-plan and co-working areas, with a large kitchen upstairs, which participants had access to, along with a studio area where the classes were held.These recently constructed, built-for-purpose rooms are bright, with wooden panelling, large windows and areas that invite interaction with others in the space.Upon entering each EMA session, participants were greeted with a large table full of snacks.In the middle of each session, the tea break would give participants an opportunity to talk -or continue to work on their music if they preferred.
In interviews, participants related their ability to connect to one another to the atmosphere in classes, and to the way the EMA helped them construct a new shared identity during the sessions.Interviewees noted that the built-in time for social elements such as food supplied for participants in every class and time dedicated to tea breaks and conversation -was mentioned as an important aspect of this.
It was definitely a very comfortable setting.We would come in and there would be snacks on the table, and it smells nice and it's warm in there.There's no tables.Everyone just sort of sits along a bench, and you sort of grab a seat and watch the projector.And whoever's running the class wheels around.They're not necessarily facing the class.But it does feel like a casual conversation with a group of people.I have previously done some Ableton courses, and it was held in a nightclub.It was really dark, and there was just a projector and someone up at the DJ booth, and there was no interaction, they were really far away, and I didn't really take anything away from those classes.But yeah, because this felt more like a conversation, I was more enticed and enthused to be learning in that environment, for sure.(Interview 5) It was observed that the sharing/communal aspect was also reinforced by the built environment and routines of the classes, which incorporated a sense of comfort at odds with the aggressive or hedonistic norms of music making spaces.
During the period interviews were conducted, plans were underway for an ongoing monthly catch up for EMA participants.All interviewees expressed excitement at the prospect of this, and of finding ways to continue to not just maintain the connections they had built during the programme, but to replicate the atmosphere created during the sessions in other music spaces.One interviewee explains how: The desire of this participant to take the social elements involving food and conversation into other music spaces demonstrates further how a programme like this can impact wider industry norms as participants establish their own music careers.
Lastly, it is worth considering the gender-theoretical implications of the consciously welcoming features of the space, the generous approach of instructor Bea and other guests, and the open, unusually flexible, and student-centred structure of the classes observed -all of which are reinforced in interviews with students about why the classes were appealing to them.One concern is pointing out the observable impacts of such choices on gender diverse youth, girls, and women, without falling into reductive conflations of the social qualities of femininity with biological femaleness, or of care, comfort, and nurture as uniquely feminine and/or female attributes.A similar question can be applied to the association of the feminine and women with domesticity when it comes to interactions with music technology.With both the serving of food and the choice of décor of the space itself, the teaching space appears to have been adjusted so that it may feel more like a lounge room in someone's home than like a laboratory.Such stereotypical notions of femininity have taken decades of work to undo in feminist philosophical thought (e.g. de Beauvoir 2011/1949), queer theory (e.g. Butler 2006), and gendertheoretical rebukes of femininity as lack and of the notion that 'anatomy is destiny' (e.g.Freud in Irigaray 1985, 71).
More recently, however, critical femininity studies and femme theory (Dahl 2012;Hoskin and Blair 2022) have built on all of this work to aim for more even-handed, intersectional, and trans-affirmative understandings of femininity.This has included, among other things, acknowledging, reclaiming and celebrating femininity and the femme, and problematizing the ways that these categories have succumbed to unjustifiably negative reputations in the service of opposing the heteropatriarchy (Hoskin and Blair, 2022, pp. 3-4).As Timmerman (2011) notes, femininity, or the socalled soft pedagogy of a feminized teaching workforce, has even been blamed for educational issues that young boys face in schools.The recent positive turn towards femininity, on the other hand, occurs across disciplines, including in bioethics, where 'cultures of care' are explicitly linked with women's bodies and 'orientations' of nurture are put forward as alternatives to individualism, while distinguishing itself from straightforward biological determinism (Rodriguez 2022; see also Wilson 2015).With such a theoretical context in mind, it is possible to view the methods of the EMA programme as embracing or reclaiming feminine modes of sociality to create a more comfortable, safe, and welcoming environment within which GNC youth, girls, and women could learn how to produce music electronically.
The underlying philosophy of the EMA programme is to intervene into existing power asymmetries in a particular, cis man or boy-dominated learning environment.However, it is worth posing a question whose answer would be far larger than the scope of this article: in what way does the separation of genders for the sake of pedagogy risk reinforcing and ultimately contributing to the system it seeks to challenge?Is the only way to effectively teach people in a world where inequality is still the norm to separate them from each other such that the power dynamics that exist 'out there' are not allowed to manifest 'in here'?It is possible to look at this from many viewpoints, but one would be in relation to how the benefits of separating genders has historically been used in the service of educating girls and boys separate during schooling, in part because girls learn better in the absence of boys, or girls and boys learn differently and have different strengths and weaknesses (see Carpenter and Hayden 1987;Salomone 2003).Where such debates have taken place (see Smyth 2010), the argument for separation has served both conservative positions on the continuation of a British-informed tradition of the single-sex school in Australia and other English-speaking countries (see Lingard, Mills, and Weaver-Hightower 2012), and progressive positions that claim that such schools existed precisely to address the inequalities in society, to give girls more opportunities to do what boys were already encouraged and allowed to do (see Gurian, Stevens, and Daniels 2009).The argument, which is often focused on the idea that girls from single-sex education are more likely than their coeducational peers to choose STEMM (science, technology, mathematics, and medicine) school subjects and career paths, has been nuanced and even challenged in other research (see Forgasz and Leder 2020;Law and Sikora 2020).
Electronic music technologies, as we have shown, occupy a similar position in musical contexts as science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine do in broader educational contexts.The interaction with electronic instruments centrally includes a relationship with technology and engineering.The broader questions about the separation or not of genders for educational contexts are therefore relevant to questions about how young women, girls, and gender nonconforming youth might be better served in electronic music and studio production environments.In our case study, we do not argue that the approaches of the EMA programme are applicable everywhere, nor that they should be taken as some kind of ideal model of pedagogy in cis man-dominated areas of learning.Rather, we are concerned with the ways that participants responded to a particular programme where the results presented to us were overwhelmingly positive.The political and educational philosophies that need to be reckoned with in such methods, should, of course, remain open to further inquiry.

Conclusions
The EMA programme offered many points of difference from the commonplace experiences that women, girls, and GNC youth have and the typical environments that they find themselves in when they are seeking to learn how to produce music electronically.In this article, we have described and analysed a few that we believe have the most significant import for gender and electronic music.These can also be extended to other kinds of music that have historically been dominated by cis men.
One reason for the programme's success is the rejection of adopting masculine-style confidence as a means for femme-identifying people to overcome the problems they encounter in historically masculine spaces and practices.Rather than placing the onus on women to 'lean in' (Sandberg 2013) or to adopt an electronic music equivalent of 'power posing' (Cuddy 2015), there is a gentle, accommodating redirection of students' focus from what may come up as feelings of lack or uncertainty to the skills themselves.In this sense, the programme is about competency rather than confidence, which does not fall into the trap of blaming girls, women, and gender diverse people for the problems they have encountered in a cis man-dominated field.
Another way to understand the success of the EMA classes is the emphasis on process over product, encouraged and reinforced throughout the programme through efforts to make the environment itself welcoming, safe, hospitable and non-intimidating in a wide range of ways, as well as Beatrice's teaching approaches.The addition of elements that help students enjoy themselves and engage in non-competitive sociality is key: if the space has home-like features, the idea that students need to aim for an unattainable ideal of quality is removed.This is further assisted by the demystification by Bea and guests of mistakes and of trial and error, as well as showing not only how so-called 'experts' themselves make mistakes and sometimes do 'bad' work but experience the very same emotional ups and downs as they contend with the ups and downs of their production work.Naturalizing and normalizing such challenges as part of the creative process of making, as opposed to obfuscating, underplaying, or avoiding it to save 'face', was one of the most significant ways that students were put at ease, as they could come to acceptance of their own insecurities rather than being in a perpetual state of struggle with them.These, together with the obvious fact that there were no cis men or boys present, were among the ways that students were able to avoid fixating on success versus failure and did not feel compelled to compare themselves to, and compete with, others around them.
The qualities of being welcoming, comfortable, and safe (which interviewees described the EMA teaching methods and space as) may be framed in gender terms in various ways, from challenging masculinity as the standard mode of operation, to unintentionally upholding limited understandings of femininity.Whatever ways such qualities might be interpreted, the EMA classes indisputably achieved what they set out to: providing something other than cis man-dominated and masculine-coded spaces, practices, and cultures in which to learn how to produce music electronically.Regardless of whether one 'reads' into the symbolism of interior design features such as wood panelling or the hospitality of serving food as feminine, femme, or related traits, the aggregate effect of all such details together with the responsive pedagogical style of Bea was that participants had a better time, and learned more, than they had previously had in contexts of learning how to produce.This underscores the importance of providing a range of approaches to teaching and guidance of skills that skew heavily towards one or another gender due to sociocultural norms at any given time.It also illustrates the extent to which the general approach of supportive, as opposed to punitive, competitive or individualistic, modes of sociality, may be a helpful starting point to helping gender diverse people, girls and women overcome some of the issues of prejudice and exclusion in electronic music described earlier.To this end, programmes that experiment with the full range of teaching approaches ought to be encouraged and supported wherever possible.

Notes
1. https://www.thepush.com.au/news/applications-now-open-for-the-electronic-musicaccelerator 2. ie, mainly consisting of social groups dominated by men. 3. Ethics approval granted by RMIT Human Ethics Committee December 2020 (project number 23,950).4. The full EMA report containing the data from these surveys is available on request from the authors.5. Further demographic information on these interviewees, beyond what is already known from their participation in the program (ie, they identify as women or gender diverse and are aged 16-25) has not been provided here to avoid interviewees becoming identifiable.6.While this article does not have the scope to fully explore how the EMA may be thought of as a 'safe space' in a theoretical sense (see Anderson 2021; Flensner and Von der Lippe 2019) we note that this would likely be a productive area of further research.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
So we had the idea of having like a night -like a Wednesday night or Thursday night -of people like [DJ] and different friends of ours come and DJ and just like share skills and just like literally have wine and cheese and just have kind of just women.It sounds good, right?Women and non-binary people and just open it up for people to share skills, to kind of give us ideas to do different stuff like that.(Interview 1) When you get frustrated, that just means that what you're doing is really important to you and you really want it.AndI think that when you have mentors like[Bea]and [Push employee] and a classroom of encouraging [fem-identifying] people, I think it makes you feel less alone.And it makes -just to see everyone else going through that same struggle and that same, like, 'What is happening?I don't even get what's going on right now.' It's really, really comforting.And it's more encouraging for you to -it made me feel more encouraged to just keep learning.And not even focus on whether I'm good or not.To just keep smashing those goals.(Interview 2)