Events

Dr. Abhishek Nagaraj
Assistant Professor in the Management and Organizations
Haas School of Business
University of California Berkeley

New technologies are constantly transforming how culture is produced. Production-of-culture scholars have long posited that technological change influences the diversity of content in cultural fields. But how does such change affect demographic diversity among producers of culture? We study the advent of digital recording technologies in the production of music, and ask whether their adoption has shifted the allocation of artistic gigs between male and female artists. If so, how? Specifically, we argue that digital cultural production has the potential to increase gender inequality. Digitization reduces barriers to entry, but also necessitates greater self-promotion on the part of artists to stand out in a crowded labor market. Insofar as male artists can promote themselves more readily than can female artists, digital cultural production inadvertently increases the allocation of artistic gigs to male artists, though this self-promotion deficit can be mitigated when women benefit from audience endorsements. We develop and test this theory using in-depth interviews and a novel quantitative dataset relating to the labor market for studio singers in the Indian Hindi film industry (“Bollywood”). This paper contributes to the study of culture, technology, labor markets and gender, and explores the implications of technological change for women in the arts.