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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