BLOG 16/12/2020
The Jan Diaries — PlayStation, Quotas and Women on Lineups
Quotas for women on club lineups are not a good thing, Jan Kinčl writes, and they are not a bad thing either — they are so necessary that the good-or-bad question misses the point entirely. That is the opening move of the last Jan Diaries entry of 2020, and the argument that follows is built around a PlayStation.
What the piece covers
The quota Kinčl is describing is the ordinary mechanism: a mandatory percentage of women, or men, in a pool of candidates, whether that pool is a parliament, a company board or a party lineup. He accepts the state of play without flinching. Peggy Gou, Nina Kraviz, Kelli Hand, Steffi and Helena Hauff are all at the top of the field, and DJ culture is still overwhelmingly male anyway. His claim is that this cannot possibly be good for the music: the health of any field tracks the range of voices in it, and a monoculture of one gender is a creative ceiling long before it is anything else.
The argument he actually wants to knock down is the one that says women are, on average, simply not as good at DJing. He calls it a missed argument, and answers it with an analogy about a games console. If he, Duić and Pytzek have a PlayStation and play Tekken every day for ten years, and Ljubica joins now, of course she will be worse — not because she is incapable, but because she has had a fraction of the exposure. DJing has no textbook. There is no manual that shortcuts the years of accumulated experience across different rooms, different crowds and different situations, and the skill exists only as the residue of that time. Deny somebody access to the rooms and to permission to experiment badly in them, and you have guaranteed the outcome you then point at as proof.
The part that stayed
The consequence Kinčl draws is not primarily an ethical one, though he calls sexual discrimination one of the most primitive and oldest forms of discrimination there is. It is that an artificially narrowed field produces asymmetrical conversation partners — a discourse where everybody has had roughly the same experiences, and the exchange gets boring. The loss is creative, and it is everybody’s. Beyond being ethically wrong, he concludes, by 2020 and 2021 it should be obvious that excluding women is purely counterproductive from a creative standpoint. At three minutes, it is one of the shortest entries in the series and one of the least equivocal.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Three minutes.
The Jan Diaries | PlayStation, kvote i zastupljenost žena na lineupovima → redbull.com