We've got a new T-shirt in our Cafepress store. Ten percent of the purchase price will go to Girls Rock! Chicago, a nonprofit that teaches self-expression through music to girls, trans youth, and gender-nonconforming youth.
One of the unignorable facts of playing out is the gender imbalance of live rock music. In multiple-act lineups, I've started keeping track of the ratio; often it's 1:10 or worse. There are a lot of reasons for that, ranging from critical perceptions of the relative gravitas of rock and pop, to the prevalence of male radio DJs and other cultural gatekeepers, to the way rock instruments and gear are marketed to dudes, to tone policing of women's voices, to good old-fashioned prejudice. Anyway, once you start seeing it, you can't un-see it. Here's hoping that, in our small way, we can help balance things out.
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