Gender Report 2015

Some basic numbers on gender (in)equality in my community

Since 2011, I have made oc­ca­sional for­ays into gen­der au­dit­ing as a way of pay­ing at­ten­tion to my po­si­tion in the re­mark­ably un­equal field of con­tem­po­rary music com­po­si­tion. My at­tempts were oc­ca­sional — a cou­ple of analy­ses of my im­me­di­ate en­vi­ron­ments in recog­ni­tion of In­ter­na­tional Women’s Day, some (per­haps brash) com­ments upon find­ing my­self pro­grammed on all-male con­certs — and their ir­reg­u­lar­ity was prob­lem­atic.

What fol­lows below is the re­sult of re­struc­tur­ing this site. I have built a mech­a­nism that al­lows me to quickly ac­cess up-to-date data for the con­certs where my works are and have been per­formed — a re­flec­tion of the com­mu­nity as I par­tic­i­pate in it. These are not ex­haus­tive num­bers.

My own per­sonal per­for­mance con­text does not nec­es­sar­ily mir­ror all of con­tem­po­rary music.
Gen­der in­equal­ity is far more com­plex than a tally of whose music is per­formed. Gen­der au­dits do lit­tle to help re­veal the causes of in­equal­ity. How­ever, I do be­lieve that at the very least they are a re­minder of the work still left to do, an aid in strate­gic “gen­der main­stream­ing,” and for any doubters, proof of a very real im­bal­ance.

The data on this page in­cludes events since 2007, run­ning up until the time of post­ing. I don’t cur­rently have the data to analyse how a com­poser’s age fac­tors into this, but I’m work­ing on it.

Some basic num­bers

  • Num­ber of works pro­grammed — Total: 361
  • Works by male com­posers: 297 (82.2%)
  • Works by fe­male com­posers: 64 (17.7%)
Break­down of works per­formed by com­poser gen­der
  • Num­ber of con­certs — Total: 54
  • All-male pro­grammes: 22 (40.7%)
All-male con­cert pro­grammes
  • Works pro­grammed — Total: 6.6
  • Works by male com­posers: 5.4
  • Works by fe­male com­posers: 1.1
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 14.6%. That amounts to a drop in rep­re­sen­ta­tion of 40.8% in the 5 years since my Mas­ters grad­u­a­tion.

An overview of all the con­certs

Pro­por­tion of works by fe­male com­posers for every con­cert
  • Just 2 con­certs (of 54) have fea­tured a pro­gramme where half or more of the works are by fe­male com­posers.
  • On av­er­age just 17.7% of works played are by fe­male com­posers.

The data

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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