Gender Diversity in the Music Industry? The Numbers Are Grim

Stacy L. Smith, associate professor at the University of Southern California three years ago, and the founder of the Annaberg Inclusive Initiative, noted that only 28% of the top speakers were females, only females found research attention We gathered. 4% of movies are for women

According to a new study led by Dr. Smith, in the past 6 years women have fewer representatives of pop music.

Analysis of the top 600 songs (defined by Billboard's top 100 charts for each year of 6 years) from 2012 to 2017 revealed that 22.4% of 1,239 performance artists are female.

The number of people behind the scenes is much less. There are 2,767 noun songwriters among these songs. 12.3% of them are women. In this survey, it was found that the female producer who is most responsible for the sound of pop music is even more rare and occupies only 2% of 300 songs in the same period.

In the interview, Dr. Smith said, "Women's contribution and leadership are excluded".

The music industry is doing a better job of ethnic and ethnic diversity. Of the 1,239 performance artists who participated in the survey, 42% were from ethnic minorities and 38.7% higher than the US census.

The difficulties encountered by women in entering the music industry are well documented, but the severity of the findings is surprising. For example, at the Grammy Awards, the success of stars such as Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Adele may be headlines. But most of the awards are owned by men.

Of the 899 people nominated for the past 6 Grammy awards, 90.7% were males and 3% were females. In this survey, we found that women are most likely to enter the category of the newest artists. (This year, three of the five budding artists are female.) AlessiaCara, Julia Michaels, SZA. The only woman in this year 's album is Lorde.

By observing the top 100 songs of the year, Dr. Smith's study excludes thousands of artists and many niche type artists that are less noticeable commercially. Dr. Smith defended this approach by focusing on "the song and story defined by the agenda" and the widest audience.

According to this survey, nine male songwriters are in charge of nearly a fifth of the top songs in the past 6 years. At the top are Max Martin 36 clicks, Drake 25 years old, Benny Blanc 22 years old.

The most songs were made by Nicki Minaj, 15 years old, Rihanna, 13 years old, Taylor Swift, 11 years old.

Dr. Smith said her team plans to do further research on the music industry, including observing the "pipeline" of executive level women and business units.

Interestingly, some reliable measure of the sex I saw in the music industry came from the whole pond. PRS for Music is one of the largest collection associations in the UK, and in the latest report on female production music, only 16% of women are female. The trading group British Music Company recently launched the first diversification working group. This showed that women in the UK music industry made up about 60% of entry-level employees, but accounted for only 30% of senior management positions. As early as 2012, the British Independent Music Association (AIM) discovered that only 15% of its label members are owned by women by majority.

Comparing this with the results of the UK Music Diversity Task Force, we can think that it is similar to the orientation of the United States. In the UK music industry generally men are 54%, as mentioned above senior executives are biased 70%. Men This means that the average music conference is worse than the real world from the perspective of gender equality. In order to better understand the position of each conference, as shown below, according to the percentage of male speakers and the overlap rate of speakers (rate of conference to other speakers shared in the data set) It mapped to the on-axis bubble chart. Bubble size is the size of the meeting measured by the number of speakers (future music forums, the yellow dotted line is the smallest, while the Canadian music week is the biggest).