Doechii Says Billboard Girls in Music Is a ‘Necessity’ within the Trade

Sizzling off a Grammy win for finest rap album for her 2024 LP Alligator Bites By no means Heal and the information that her single “Nervousness” had hit prime 10 on the Billboard Sizzling 100, Doechii took the stage at Billboard’s Girls in Music 2025 occasion on Saturday (March 29) evening to just accept the distinction for 2025 Lady of the 12 months.

“The place’s the swamp? Do I’ve any followers in the home?” Doechii requested the viewers inside YouTube Theater in Inglewood, Calif., to laughs and applause after an introduction from two of her collaborators, Jayda Love and DJ Miss Milan.

“I can’t consider it was simply two years in the past I stood on this stage proper right here and accepted the Billboard Rising Star Award. I had actually carried out so arduous I danced my footwear off and needed to hop as much as the mic,” she recalled of her performances of “Persuasive” and “Loopy,” smiling. “And right here I’m. That second displays how I strategy my profession – at all times go full out, at all times go arduous and at all times be fab.”

Thanking her household, God and the various girls on her crew and at her label, Doechii famous the Lady of the 12 months honor was “a full-circle second.”

She additionally talked in regards to the significance of Billboard Girls in Music as an annual trade occasion. “I stand right here as a fierce ally,” the Grammy-winning rapper mentioned. “That phrase is a key cause there’s a Billboard Girls in Music.” The occasion, which started in 2007, took place as a result of “girls within the music enterprise had been uninterested in not getting their seats on the desk or the credit score they deserved,” she mentioned. “This occasion was created out of a necessity. That phrase, necessity, is essential. My mixtape, Alligator Bites By no means Heal, was an area I created out of necessity. An area the place I may really feel seen, heard and join with different folks by experiences.”

The Swamp Princess famous that just about twenty years after Billboard Girls in Music first began, a “lack of inclusion and sexism are nonetheless points on this trade. And that’s an issue. Which is why I’m grateful now we have Billboard Girls in Music.

“That is our motherf–king evening to rightfully come collectively to acknowledge one another, help one another and to rejoice,” she mentioned. “We’re the creators, we’re the executives, we’re the innovators who’re simply as central to this trade as the boys. Clock it.”