Gender Audit

The latest data for concerts including my music

Some basic numbers

  • Number of works programmed — Total: 508
  • Works by male composers: 391 (76.9%)
  • Works by female composers: 116 (22.8%)
Breakdown of works performed by composer gender
  • Number of concerts — Total: 82
  • All-male programmes: 25 (30.4%)
All-male concert programmes
  • Works programmed — Total: 6.1
  • Works by male composers: 4.6
  • Works by female composers: 1.3
The average concert programme

Career progression

It is often stated that there is a gradual filtering out of women at every stage of career progression: from school-age music studies, throughout academic pathways, and later in professional contexts. My data is limited, but I can compare the 4 years I was an undergraduate and masters student at the University of Manchester — when the vast majority of my performances were in student contexts and 24.7% of works performed were by female composers — with the period since then, for which that figure is just 22.3%. That amounts to a drop in representation of 9.71% in the 14 years since my Masters graduation.

Gender & Age

Experience suggests that age plays a factor in gender imbalances: namely that while both genders might be represented in a specific context, women may have to work harder and longer for the same opportunities, or are delayed in career progression by various societal hurdles, and so reach equivalent career points later than their male colleagues. Unfortunately, this is very hard to quantify without more detailed research — evaluating career progression properly would be very complex.

Measuring average age at time of performance is one option, but this seems to be indicative of rather little (28.8 for women; 36.8 for men) — the average age for male composers probably skews high thanks to more performances of works by older, established composers (even more likely to be male than programmed composers in general); and perhaps the average for female composers skews low given the higher number of female composers in student contexts in this set of data (see ‘Career progression’).

To try to understand this better, one might consider the typical age differences within individual concerts. In other words, are female or male composers likely to be older or younger in comparison to the other composers on the same programme? On average, female composers are 0.26 years younger than the concert average, with male composers 0.13 years older. Again, I’d suggest the data is currently insufficient: just 33 of 82 concerts are being taken into account here with complete age data; and the sample is too biased to provide any insights.

An overview of all the concerts

Proportion of works by female composers for every concert
  • Just 8 concerts (of 82) have featured a programme where half or more of the works are by female composers.
  • On average just 22.8% of works played are by female composers.

There are 22 concerts missing programme data. These are ignored entirely in the statistics above.

If you are code-minded and would like to play around with the event data, download the event data JSON-LD file. It contains data for every event in my archive, marked up with schema.org vocabularies.

An up-to-date summary of all the data, can always be found on the Gender Audit page.

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