According to a new report, Nicki Minaj is one of the top few female musicians in the industry where 57% of songs don’t have a female author.
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Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images
According to a new report, Nicki Minaj is one of the top few female musicians in the industry where 57% of songs don’t have a female author.
Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images
The music industry is nowhere near gender parity. Under a new study from USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, women lag behind men as artists, but the problem is particularly acute when it comes to areas such as songwriting, production, and engineering.
All this is despite the Recording Academy’s stated efforts in trying to expand opportunities for women.
The Spotify-funded study examined the artists, songwriters, and producers credited on songs that appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 Year-end Charts as of 2012. According to their statistics, not yet A quarter of the artists on the chart in 2021 are women. Over the past ten years, that number has stagnated at 21%.
Over the past decade, women made up only 12.7% of musicians. The study also counted manufacturers for selected years and found that women made up just 2.8%.
In 2019, the Recording Academy launched an initiative called Women in the mix to try to combat the shortage of women in production and engineering positions, requiring participating artists, brands and managers to consider at least two women when hiring for a producer or engineer. According to the study, the effort to date has failed to produce any quantifiable improvements.
“Industry solutions must do more than provide lip service to make a difference,” USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative founder Stacy Smith said in a statement. “They have to target the underlying reasons for exclusion and have strong metrics and accountability in place to ensure that they deliver real progress.”
The study compared the advancement of women in the music industry to that of people of color. In 2021, 57% of artists are people of color, compared with 38.4% in 2012.
Women of color in particular have made strides on the artist front – making up more than half of all female artists by 2021, as well as outstripping white women as musicians. But only one woman of color was recorded as a producer in 2021.
The report also goes on to examine the Grammy Awards where the percentage of women nominated in major categories fell for the first time since 2019.
