What’s it like to be a woman in music today?
The question itself part of a persistent and entrenched problem in the industry
For her 13th birthday, Sadie Dupuis received a Fender Stratocaster — something she knew most girls didn’t experience. “Every 13-year-old boy, when I was a kid, was handed an electric guitar. Girls weren’t really pushed in that direction unless they guided themselves toward it or had really cool parents. For a lot of kids, their gender (got) in the way of them having access to certain genres of music.”
Lindsey Jordan was almost one of those kids. In 2007, when she was eight, she wondered, did you have to be a boy to be in a band? Her sister brought her to a show by Paramore, whose lead singer and keyboardist was a woman.
“I saw Hayley Williams and her outfit and she’s killing it, and she’s so punk, and I was like, ‘That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,’” Jordan said.
Dupuis now fronts the highly acclaimed rock band Speedy Ortiz, while Jordan, recording as Snail Mail, is one of the hottest new artists in guitar-based music. They are two of several female musicians cited as proof the gender disparity in rock music is shrinking. If you scour any critic’s best-of list these days, you’ll find it all but dominated by women — Mitski, Sharon Van Etten, Robyn and Boygenius, the supergroup made up of Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers.
Yet women still enjoy far less success in the industry, and female artists say they contend with unspoken quotas that keep them off playlists and festival bills.
Only 7.7 per cent of inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are women, according to research by Evelyn McDonnell, the director of journalism at Loyola Marymount University who edited Women Who Rock: Bessie to Beyoncé. Girl Groups to Riot Grrrl.
In 2017, Pitchfork found only a quarter of artists booked at the 23 biggest music festivals were women. Since then, more than 190 international festivals pledged to have a 50/50 gender split by 2022, but as of 2018, the magazine found that still “seven out of 10 artists on festival bills are men or all-male bands.”
These numbers aren’t relegated to rock. A 2012 study helmed by Stacy L. Smith, an associate professor at the University of Southern California and the founder of its Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, surveyed the top 600 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 from 2012 to 2017 and found that 22.4 per cent of them were performed by women, 12.3 per cent were written by women and only two per cent of a 300-song subset were produced by women.
“When it comes to women’s ability to contribute and to lead,” Smith told The New York Times, “they’re being shut out of the process.”
“It’s funny,” said singer-songwriter Dacus. “These pieces always state, ‘Women are making such good music right now.’ But it’s like, (what about) Janis Joplin? Billie Holiday? Ella Fitzgerald?”
“There have always been women at the centre of rock music,” said McDonnell.
“As a female musician, you get dumped in your little pink sidecar before you’ve even stepped into your own shoes,” said Emily Haines, who records as a solo artist, fronts Metric and plays in Broken Social Scene.
Wait a minute. Is this one of those stories?
Admittedly, yes. Yet a number of female rockers grudgingly choose to talk about gender because they feel a duty to ensure women remain visible in their profession.
“It’s boring and frustrating to have similar conversations (again and again),” said Julia Cumming of Sunflower Bean.
“But at the same time, if there’s still girls that don’t feel comfortable playing, and they still need to see someone out there to do it, then it’s still important to talk about.”
Laetitia Tamko, the Cameroon-born multi-instrumentalist known as Vagabon, wasn’t sure she wanted to be involved with this story at all — the premise seemed to her “a weird form of sensationalism while being extremely reductive.”
But she felt a responsibility to represent black women and spread some attention to bands that don’t often get national press, such as Mal Devisa, Tasha and Black Belt Eagle Scout. Plus, the stories might have impact.
“If Lollapalooza or Coachella knows ... that there’s going to be a big article that shows the percentage of women or people of colour on their lineup, those are things making really positive changes,” said Michelle Zauner, who records as Japanese Breakfast.
Last year, Sunflower Bean faced an uphill battle taking a new single to radio.
“Stations say, ‘We like the song, this is a great song. (But) we have too many women in rotation right now,’” Cumming said. “Stations will have about three women they keep in main rotation, and if you are a woman trying to get into that rotation, that means that they’re going to kick another woman off. Men’s music is still considered music. Women’s music is still considered other music, even though women are being photographed, used on the Spotify banners and written about.”
Some hope that the rise of streaming might help women sidestep the hardwired biases of the radio industry. Yet, a detailed report in The Baffler by culture writer Liz Pelly analyzed both Spotify’s biggest playlists along with the ones the service curates for individual users and found its “most popular and visible playlists to be staggeringly male-dominated.”
Perhaps singer-songwriter St. Vincent summed it up best in a fake television interview she created in 2017. She’s sitting in a green room, answering questions. “Insert question about being a woman in music,” the title screen reads.
“What’s it like being a woman in music? Very good question,” St. Vincent says as the camera zooms in on her fingernails, which are painted bright yellow with black lettering reading, “F--- off.”
She declined an interview request for this story.
The Washington Post