Women remain underrepresented and stereotyped in music, new report finds
A new report on US music chart trends has found that female-identifying performers, songwriters and producers remain underrepresented and stereotyped.
The sixth annual University Of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative Report, which focused on Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 chart for 2022, discovered that the amount of top-selling female artists in the US increased that year, however, the proportion of female songwriters making any commercial impact is still meagre.
The amount of women represented overall in the chart was 30 per cent. Just 14 per cent of songwriters represented on the chart were women (a slight decrease from the 2021 statistic of 14.3 per cent) while only 3.4 per cent of the 232 producers represented on the year-end chart were women, and one producer was non-binary [via The Guardian].
Specifically, the 30 per cent representation has marked a new high for the amount of female artists on the year-end chart over the past decade. But the statistics for female songwriters and producers have largely stayed the same over the past decade.
Since 2012, which was the beginning of the reporting period for the Annenberg report, the amount of female songwriters represented in the Billboard year-end chart has never been higher than 14.4 per cent (in 2019).
“There is good news for women artists this year,” Dr Stacy L Smith, who led the report, said in a statement. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – there is still much work to be done before we can say that women have equal opportunity in the music industry.”
Additionally, the majority of artists on the 2022 year-end chart were from an underrepresented racial background – a 6.6 percentage point decrease from 2021, and an 8.4 percentage point decline from 2020 – and 65 per cent of artists from those backgrounds were women.
The peak amount of female producers represented on the chart also landed in 2019 when 5 per cent of producers on the year-end list were women.
Dr Smith added: “Until women and men artists hire women songwriters and producers the numbers will not move. It’s more than just allowing an artist to credit themselves on a song, it’s about identifying talent and hiring women in these roles. That’s the only way that we will see change occur.”
Elsewhere, in its analysis of Grammy award nominees, the report found that 13.9 per cent of individual nominees were women, with one non-binary nominee.
The Annenberg report suggested in its conclusion that while gains made for female artists represented in the charts are promising, women behind-the-scenes in songwriting and production roles are still underrepresented.
It proposed that “women are stereotyped – in terms of the types of songs and genres they can create, and the roles they can play – they are sexualised, and their talents and experience are discounted”.
Schemes that support women to build experience in music may be ever-important to help redress the imbalances.
The study follows backlash in the UK to the 2023 BRIT Awards Artist Of The Year nomination category being filled with only male entrants.
Nominees for the upcoming awards this month were announced on January 12 and in the UK Artist Of The Year category, Central Cee, Fred Again.., George Ezra, Harry Styles and Stormzy were all nominated.
This is the second year that the awards have abandoned gender categories in favour of gender neutral ones, but when it was revealed that the UK Artist Of The Year category was all-male, the awards were criticised by fans and figures from across the entertainment industry.
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Charlotte Krol
NME
