At first glance, classical music seems dominated by men to a degree that's rare among the arts. But a more thorough comparison shows that its gender balance is not unusual.
NPR’s Anastasia Tsioulcas just wrote a scathingly brilliant post about the “fat-shaming” of the gifted Irish mezzo Tara Erraught. A plague of British music critics sounded like teenage boys as they dissed not Erraught's singing but the supposed flaws of her body. Last year, Tsioulcas chronicled some notorious “outbursts against female conductors." Now she says that all of this “honestly makes me wonder if classical music doesn't deserve its stereotype of being silly, reactionary, outdated and out of step with the contemporary world.” While I share her views on fat-shaming and on gender balance, I wondered how much more advanced the rest of the "contemporary world" of the arts actually is. So I began to gather data.
http://youtu.be/WM8J5d9tmkU
I assumed that it would support the stereotype of classical music being an extreme case. After all, this art form centers on a repertory written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when women had absurdly limited chances to develop public professional careers. So I was more surprised than I should have been to find that other arts can be just as unbalanced. For example:
- Literature and writing: By the mid-1870s. Emily Dickinson had written most of her unique, unsurpassed poetry and Mary Anne Evans had published the greatest novel in the English language (using the male nom-de-plume George Eliot). Given such precedent, it amazed me that in today's leading literary journals, women make up only 20-35% of the writers published or reviewed. That's according to Vida Count, which keeps statistics. To stray outside the arts, 63% of the bylines this year in America's top 10 newspapers are male, as are all but one of this year's individual winners of a Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
- Film Directing: What art claims to be more in touch with modern life than cinema? But behind the camera (directors, writers, and producers), men outnumber women five to one. In the 100 top-grossing films of in each of the years 2007-2012, only 4% of the directors were female. As for top honors, only one Academy Award for Best Director has ever gone to a woman, and only two films directed by women have ever received the Cannes Festival Palme d'Or for directing. And the pace of change seems slow: at this year's Cannes Festival, only 7% of the 1,800 films submitted (and 20% 0f those accepted) were directed by women.
- Film Acting: I assumed there would be balance in front of the cameras; after all, women slightly outnumber men in real life, so you'd expect movie characters to show the same ratio. But remarkably, the top 100 movies have about two-and-a-half men for every female character. And do I even need to make the case that actresses have it worse than just about any other artists when it comes to being judged primarily for their looks? (If you do want evidence, check the Annenberg study.)
- Jazz: DownBeat magazine’s Hall of Fame includes 126 artists, but only seven are women - about 5.5%.
- Blues: The Blues Hall of Fame includes 193 inductees, but only 21 are women - about 11%.
- Pop: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has inducted 304 soloists or acts—but only 37 (about 12%) include any women at all. To be sure, that hall is focused on the past, and women are now better represented in pop: Ludovic Hunter-Tilney reports in the Financial Times that in the UK in 2012, the top-selling records “were evenly split between female and male solo acts, each accounting for about 30 per cent of total sales (groups made up the rest). Women also appeared on more than half the 40 top-selling singles.” On the other hand, he notes, “the gender ratio goes badly awry behind the scenes" - only 13% of UK songwriters are female.
And we need to make further qualifications. For one thing, some of the major pop genres are heavily male-dominated, like hip-hop and country - the Country Music Hall of Fame is 83.5% male, and country's big Stagecoach Festival was 75% male this year. More to the point of the Irish mezzo dissed for her shape, judgments based on looks permeate pop music. Martha Gill argues that "pop music is dominated by women cashing in on their sexuality." She and James Reed and Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls argue that these women have full agency in said cashing-in, but Sinead O'Connor famously dissented about its being "in ANY way an empowerment" (and said, "Nothing but harm will come in the long run"). And classical-pop crossover singer Charlotte Church disputes the claim of agency by detailing her own career traumas. In a BBC talk, Church begins by asking us to picture Beyonce’s "husband Jay-Z stripped down to a T-back bikini thong, sex kittin’ his way through a boulevard of suited-and-booted women for their pleasure..." After other imaginary examples, she says, “When I was 19 or 20, I found myself in this position, being pressured into wearing more and more revealing outfits. And the lines I had spit at me again and again, generally by middle-aged men, were ‘you look great, you’ve got a great body, why not show it off?’” Here is her complete talk:
To be sure, we're seeing an explosion of great women singer-songwriters who choose not to "cash in on their sexuality" and have the leverage to resist those who push them to. Neko Case, for example, used "Peggy Olson" as a verb for what she will not let the media do to her. But my point remains: while classical music needs major improvement - quickly - its gender issues are not as unusual or anachronistic as they seem.
To be sure, some arts more male-dominated than others. Why? Here are two theories, which both might contribute to explaining why classical music is no outlier:
TWO HYPOTHESES: 1. "Hall of Fame" syndrome
Halls of Fame, I noted, are boy's clubs. The Country Hall of Fame includes 83% male artists, that of Rock and Roll 88% men, Blues 89%, and Jazz a whopping 94%. So a first hypothesis: whenever a musical genre has a "canon" of classics (in non-classical fields, mostly recordings) and a pantheon of greats (in non-classical cases, often hall-of-famers), they tend to come from eras when women were discouraged from participating. Classical concert halls sometimes display statues of "immortal" dead composers, and they are always male; but that might be just as true if statue-themed performance spaces existed for other musical genres.
When a musical genre has a pantheon of great artists of the past, and a "canon" (a core repertory of classics - usually recordings in jazz, rock, and pop genres), they tend to come from eras when men dominated and women were disempowered.
In a future post, I hope to explore the possibility that future historians will see major advances towards gender parity in composing in our decade, and I will definitely be making the case that it's already happened with the violin. But first, here's another possible contributing factor:
HYPOTHESIS 2: Hierarchy Syndrome
Also, in the future I hope to discuss conducting, the highest-status role in classical performance. For now, here's a second theory:
Some arts, like piano playing, can be practiced solo, but others require the coordination of many performers, like film, opera, or orchestral music. Art forms of the latter type often achieve coordination through hierarchy, and the people who dominate such hierarchies have usually been men. That's true not only in classical music but also in film, theater, and the like.
One speculation: the film world is starting to open up to women directors and producers, but my sense is that the conducting world is opening up at least as quickly. Some women are poised to reach the pinnacle - e.g., Marin Alsop, Susanna Malkki, and Simone Young - and many more are on their way: WQXR lists five on the rise, and Jessica Duchen helpfully lists over 100 women conductors. My point, again, is not that things are fine, but that it's conceivable that classical conducting will attain gender parity before the Cannes Festival or the Academy Awards in nominations for Best Director.
It is conceivable that classical conducting will achieve gender parity before the Academy Awards and Cannes Festival will in their best-director nominations.
Here's one more cheer for classical music: if we want to know what gender parity would look like in the real world, we can already see it in one major classical arena - and thinking about that field tells us interesting things about gender. Stay tuned - I'll go into that in Pt. II. of this post.
