Hiring women should be the standard, not the exception: Alicia Keys

"Women get it done," the Grammy award-winner says

Billboard magazine honored Alicia Keys with its Impact Award today and she's hoping to "shift the numbers" so that women behind the scenes of music and the entertainment industry at large are hired just as often as their male counterparts.

During a brunch to celebrate her new award, Keys spoke on her She Is the Music initiative, which has grown to become the largest database for hiring women in the music industry, reported the Hollywood Reporter.

"If I want to find a female lighting designer, how can I find that person? If I want to find a female sound engineer, how can I find that? If I want to find a female business manager or female lawyer," Keys said.

PHOTO: INSTAGRAM/ALICIA KEYS

The Girl On Fire singer explained that before She Is the Music, people stuck to what they knew, so everyone would recommend the same people over and over — and it was generally a man.

"I think what happens is people get used to working with who they're used to working with, and then you go and ask for a recommendation and they've been used to working with John for 100 years, so John gets recommended," Keys continued.

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"It's not that Lucy or Terry shouldn't be recommended, but we get into this systemic style of how we operate. We just get used to it, as opposed to starting to break it and think out of the box and be conscious about the choices that we're making."

PHOTO: INSTAGRAM/ALICIA KEYS

"It's happening, it's a real thing, because women get it done," she said. The Grammy-award winner revealed she was inspired to start the organization after she found out that women made up only 17 percent of artists on Billboard's Top 100 and 12.3 percent of songwriters. The numbers made her take a closer look and take action.

PHOTO: INSTAGRAM/ALICIA KEYS

She hopes that eventually, there will be a time where hiring women and women of colour isn't a novelty and is just standard operating procedure.

Eventually, she said, the industry will see it as normal, so "it's not so unusual that, 'Wow, there's two women on the board! And one of them is black!'

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