In the latest issue of Music Week, we’re celebrating all the winners at the Music Week Women In Music Awards, including Outstanding Contribution recipient Jo Dipple, International Woman Of The Year Sas Metcalfe and Inspirational Artist award winner Sharleen Spiteri.
Proper Music Group, the largest totally independent distributor in the UK, was honoured with the Company Award for diversity in the workplace at the Women In Music Awards.
Proper has a 50/50 hiring strategy (51 female employees, 54 male) with 60% of their warehouse positions held by women.
Here we present the award acceptance speech from Kameil Sattar, head of digital at Proper Music:
“Thanks for the award, thanks to Music Week and thanks to the Women In Music community for this award. This is the first award of its kind and we hope it’s one of many.
“I’m proud to be picking this up for our company. I know from the good work at UK Music and their diversity survey that happened recently that we actually found out that we were punching way above the weight of many when it comes to presenting a diverse workforce. There’s 104 staff at Proper and we represent 17 countries. There’s a 50-50 split between the men and the women in the company.
“To top that, there’s five key departments and three of those are run by women. We are proud of the fact that our diversity has not come from a position of trying to just tick the balance quota from HR, but because each person that’s been given the job has genuinely been the best candidate.
People are given the right opportunities to help make Proper the success that it is today
Kameil Sattar
“There’s a strong sense of fairness and respect for cultures, and people are given the right opportunities to help make Proper the success that it is today. By all means, it’s not plain sailing but we’re getting there. For this, I give props to our chairman Malcolm Mills and our CEO Drew Hill. When it comes to enforcing our no tolerance policy, they call out those people – they call out the sexists, they call out the homophobes and they call out those damn racists.”
You can read Sas Metcalfe’s International Woman Of The Year speech here, Sharleen Spiteri’s Inspirational Artist Award speech here and New Artist award winner Ray Blk's speech here. For Outstanding Contribution recipient Jo Dipple, click here, and for Businesswoman Of The Year Rebecca Allen's speech click here.
