We’re living in the time of Queen Bey, but the music industry has yet to receive the memo. The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has released a new study on popular music and found that, while the medium is making strides towards diversity, it’s coming up short on gender equality. “The voices of women are missing from popular music,” study author Dr. Stacy L. Smith concluded. “This is another example of what we see across the ecosystem of entertainment: women are pushed to the margins or excluded from the creative process.”
Entitled “Inclusion in the Recording Studio?” the report considers the gender and race/ethnicity of artists, songwriters, and producers across the top 600 songs from 2012 to 2017. It also looks at the gender and racial demographics of the 2012–17 Grammy nominees for Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Producer of the Year, and Best New Artist.
Smith and her team found women represented just 22.4 percent of all performers across the timeframe’s 600 most popular songs. Despite the cultural upheaval of the Women’s March and the dawn of #MeToo in 2017, the year marked a six-year low for female artists: they made up only 16.8 of the top charts’ artists. The gender disparity is even worse behind the scenes, where women comprised 12.3 percent of the top 600 songs’ writers. Across 300 songs, women accounted for two percent of producers, a ratio of 49 males for every female.
“Women are rarely credited as the creative force behind popular music,” Dr. Smith observed. “The lack of female songwriters and producers means that the epidemic of invisibility we have catalogued for women in key creative roles in film and television extends to music. These agenda-setting songs are like so many other forms of entertainment — reflective of a largely male perspective.”
Thankfully, the numbers aren’t all doom and gloom. The study found that in terms of racial/ethnic demographics, “the music industry reaches proportional representation with the U.S. population.” Forty-two percent of the top 600 songs’ artists were from underrepresented groups. Over 40 percent of female songwriters were non-white, a pleasant surprise since many pop culture studies find women of color are marginalized more than any other group. Unfortunately, that is the case with music producers: only two non-white women produced popular songs from 2012–17.
As for the Grammys, women accounted for less than 10 percent of nominees across the five awards categories studied. Less than 10 percent of Record or Album of the Year nominees were female and there have been no women up for Producer of the Year since 2013. Thirty-one percent of the female nominees studied were women of color.
Women need to hear women’s voices in music just as women need to see women onscreen. Smith said it best: “Expanding the occupational ranks and influence of women behind the scenes in entertainment is imperative to giving women equal voice in the public sphere.”
Click here to access the full “Inclusion in the Recording Studio?” report.
