Company
Digital Femmes
Digital Femmes, as described on the show by Thais Ruiz de Alda.
Episodes (1)
Thais Ruiz de Alda
Thais Ruiz de Alda of Digital Femmes explains why music metadata never captured gender, and how that gap skews streaming recommendations toward men.
Questions these episodes answer
Why did the tech industry's gender balance get worse starting in the 1980s?
Ruiz de Alda says the first software patent was registered around 1980, and after that the industry shifted from an open field welcoming both genders into a more defensive, competitive one, and gender parity among computer science students has been declining ever since.
From: Why Female Artists Are Missing From Your Playlists ft. Music Tech Europe Academy
How much startup funding do female founders actually raise?
According to Ruiz de Alda, all-female founding teams capture only about 2 percent of total venture capital funding, and that figure rises to 9 percent when a founding team mixes genders, and she puts the share that goes only to all-male founding teams at 79 percent.
From: Why Female Artists Are Missing From Your Playlists ft. Music Tech Europe Academy
Why do streaming recommendation systems favor male artists over female artists?
Ruiz de Alda says the metadata standards behind today's AI recommendation engines were agreed on around 20 years ago, before anyone anticipated they would fuel algorithmic recommendations, so gender was never included as a metadata field, and without that data AI cannot be trained or checked for gender parity in what it recommends.
From: Why Female Artists Are Missing From Your Playlists ft. Music Tech Europe Academy
Do female listeners actually stream female artists more than male listeners do?
Yes, Ruiz de Alda cites data showing female listeners' streams are about 33 percent by female artists, compared with roughly 18 percent for male listeners, which she argues shows fixing the gender metadata gap is a business opportunity for platforms chasing more streams as well as a fairness issue.
From: Why Female Artists Are Missing From Your Playlists ft. Music Tech Europe Academy
What is Digital Femmes trying to fix about music metadata standards?
Digital Femmes is pushing to make gender metadata an official industry standard, in talks with DDEX, the consortium that governs music metadata, and working with an advisory council of researchers, so streaming platforms can eventually use that data to check and correct their recommendation systems for gender parity.
From: Why Female Artists Are Missing From Your Playlists ft. Music Tech Europe Academy