Shining a light on sexism, misogyny and gender inequity in the music industry

Content Warning: This story discusses sexual assault and misogyny.

I was 18 and had just left school when I had my first experience of industry-wide misogyny that was to touch my entire career.

I was studying jazz piano overseas and my teacher was not taking me seriously. Over the weeks, his increasingly fervent attempts to seduce me ended in a sexual assault.

I went on to become a professional and awarded composer in a career that has spanned more than 35 years. But, despite my success, I have often felt like I was swimming upstream. 

Over the years I was often brushed off or undermined because of my gender. My physical attributes have been commented on over my creative abilities, my music has been dismissed, and doors have been closed in ways my male peers have not experienced.

It is alarming that this is still happening 40 years later and among women and gender diverse people in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. 

While the #MeToo movement has seen sweeping improvements to inclusion in film and the visual arts, there is still an astonishingly low representation of female or gender diverse composers, songwriters and producers, across all musical genres.

Women comprise only 11 to 13% of screen composers in Australia and 4% of composers whose compositions are played by Australia’s mainstream orchestras. Around 5% of the works performed by the world’s leading orchestras were written by women and just 0.1% were by non-binary composers – the result of centuries of discrimination, oversight and exclusion.

In 2021 and 2022, I conducted a survey of music creators who identified as female and/or gender diverse to assist the local music industry to better understand why there are marked gaps in gender representation and how to address them.  

The report, Women and Minority Genders in Music: Understanding the matrix of barriers for female and gender diverse music creators, which I co-wrote with sociologist Dr Barrie Shannon, provides new primary data about the lived experience of more than 200 music creators in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand who identify as either women (cisgender and transgender), trans men, non-binary, and/or gender diverse. 

Our analysis is the first to meaningfully include the experience of gender diverse music creators, and the fact that a female/gender diverse research team co-designed the study and co-wrote the report felt like an important gift to our music industry.

Our findings show that women and gender diverse people face a complex matrix of barriers to their participation, inclusion, recognition, career progression and longevity as music creators. 

While more than three quarters of the music creators we surveyed had undertaken formal music education, 40% of them at tertiary level or higher, we found this was not translating to similarly high representation in the music industry. 

Respondents described an industry that makes it difficult for women and gender diverse people to succeed – a ‘boys’ club’ that often promotes the interests of cisgender men at the expense of other people. Sexism, misogyny and homophobia together make up by far the most common barrier to career success identified by women and gender diverse music creators, with sexual harassment, sexual violence, and domestic violence occurring at high rates.

At the same time, women and gender diverse music creators lack confidence in their own skills and knowledge, perhaps perpetuated by a hostile industry that views them as high risk, unskilled, or a diversity box to be ticked. Many of our respondents were not as proficient with music technology as they would like to be, largely due to a lack of access or confidence in a traditionally male-dominated environment. 

We also found more access, understanding and transparency is urgently needed around the role of the producer. With men in the United States being hired as producers at the rate of 35 to every one woman, many of our respondents felt this role was out of their reach.

The report makes a range of recommendations that, if implemented, will make the music industry a safer, more welcoming and more profitable space for all music creators. We need incentives and regulation, including a Music Industry Code of Conduct, as well as across the board music industry training to remove unconscious bias and to improve safety and support.

We recommend the education sector mandate teaching of music technology at secondary level and that tertiary institutions integrate new pedagogies that engage women and gender diverse people more effectively in relation to music tech. Both tiers of the education sector could improve access to technical roles for female and gender diverse students, as our data proves that time spent with music technology equates directly to increased confidence with it. This also has implications for students from lower socio-economic backgrounds and culturally diverse backgrounds as well.

A significant barrier described by our respondents was that they do not see themselves reflected in the upper echelons of the music industry. Mentoring and role modelling, spotlighting and championing female and gender diverse music creators and producers, and developing new models for inclusion will go a long way to rectifying this problem.

I am putting my money where my mouth is. Funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), I am working with librettist and playwright Alana Valentine to metabolise the findings of our report into a new major operatic work, EMERGENC/y, that aims to deconstruct and disrupt those music industry hierarchies and structural inequities that keep people out.

The methodology I am using for this work, with the express intention to include diverse perspectives, workshops material from an incredible cast of improvisers representing the groups in question – female and gender diverse musicians from a range of cultural backgrounds. I will later consolidate the musical material into a notated score that also includes my own original music. Some of the testimonials in the report are being used verbatim and Alana Valentine will weave these with her original material as well.

I look forward to a time when our voices are truly heard – when the music industry as a whole, including orchestras and opera companies will invest in representing all groups and valuing their creative input and rich stories.

Only then will women and gender diverse people cease to face the same headwinds in their career that others have had to navigate.

Dr Felicity Wilcox is Senior Lecturer in the Music & Sound Design Program in the School of Communication. She has worked extensively as a composer and music director, including as Assistant Music Director and Composer for the Paralympic Games opening Ceremony in Sydney 2000. 

She has composed, recorded and produced the soundtracks to over 60 productions for film and television, and has received multiple ARIA, AFI and APRA/AGSC awards and nominations for her scores.