As a former education major, I’ve heard plenty of professionals speak about lack of representation of marginalized groups, specifically women, in the hard sciences and mathematics field. If women aren’t pursuing these careers, where are they going? Academia often creates a false binary system of ‘STEM’ versus ‘arts and humanities,’ and heavily implies those who choose arts and humanities are so-to-say “feminine.” As a music major and a female flutist, I’ve seen my fair share of stereotypes and sexism in my field. In a 2002 study by University of Windsor, college students rated all female musicians as having more masculine traits, but men playing traditionally “feminine” instruments as less dominant, less active, and poorer leaders than women on the same instruments.
Music is not only judged on technical terms, but also intangible artistic qualities. If people internalize these gender stereotypes for specific instruments, it may influence their perceptions of what they hear. Throughout history, there are many gendered associations with certain instruments, such as the horn’s use in hunting and the trumpet’s use in the military, traditionally masculine activities and institutions. Additionally, women throughout history have been discouraged from picking up certain instruments due to the physical characteristics required, such as concerns of women ‘toughening up the lip’ when playing brass or the provocative nature of a woman straddling the cello to play.
There are some theories that people tend to choose instruments based on their voice type: those assigned female at birth will tend towards higher pitched instruments and those assigned male at birth will choose lower pitched instruments. This logic does not hold up in the professional world. According to Suby Raman’s 2014 gender analysis of American orchestras, flute, violin and harp are the only orchestral instruments with a higher representation of women than men. But when looking at gender distribution of concertmaster and principal flute positions, 82% of concertmasters and 52% of principal flutists were men. This leadership imbalance is even larger when it comes to directors and conductors– 95% of directors are men and 91% of conductors are women.
When looking at the composer side, the Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy study of the twenty-one highest budget American orchestras’ 2020-2021 season programming found that 20 of the composers represented were female. Still, the tried-and-true canon is primarily made up of works by male composers, as 11.5% of the 855 individual works being performed by these orchestras in 2020-2021 were written by women. The total combined percentage of performances written by women composers was 7.8%. For comparison, works by Beethoven made up 7.4% of total performances, and 19 dead white men make up for roughly half of all works performed.
This discrimination is not limited to the classical music world. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, women earn 70% of Bachelor of fine arts degrees and up to 75% of Master of Fine Arts degrees in the US, but only 45.8% of visual artists are women. Their wages average out to 74 cents for every dollar earned by male artists, and women artists aged 55-64 made only 66 cents to a man’s dollar. While women make up most major art museum staff, they are underrepresented in leadership positions: only 30% of major art museum director positions are held by women, and they earn on average 75 cents to a male museum director’s dollar. While these numbers are improving every year (especially since 2020), we must examine why these imbalances exist in the first place. The 19th amendment giving American women the right to vote was ratified over a century ago, but gender roles still have a tight grip on the Western artistic world. While the subversion of gender roles has started the conversation, we still have a long way to go.
