LOS ANGELES, Jan. 25 (Xinhua) -- Women's voices are still missing from popular charts as only 22.4 percent of all performers across the 600 most popular songs over the past six years were female, showed a study released Thursday.
The study by researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) analyzed data on gender, race and ethnicity of artists and content creators across 600 popular songs on the Billboard Hot 100 year-end charts, the music industry standard record chart in the United States for singles, from 2012 to 2017.
The first-of-its-kind report shows that 2017 was a six-year low for female artists in popular music with females comprising just 16.8 percent of popular artists on the top charts. Across all years, women are more likely to receive credit as solo artists and rarely appear in duos or bands.
Female songwriters and producers are even more egregiously outnumbered. The study finds that just 12.3 percent of songwriters of the 600 most popular songs of the last six years were women, while only 2 percent of producers across 300 songs were female. For producers, this translates into a gender ratio of 49 males to every one female.
The report also examines six years of Grammy nominations in five categories. Less than 10 percent of all nominees were female. Not one woman has been nominated for Producer of the Year since 2013. Women were most likely to be nominated for Song of the Year or Best New Artist. Fewer than 10 percent of nominees for Record or Album of the Year were female. Roughly a third of the female nominees at the previous six Grammy's were women from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups.
"The voices of women are missing from popular music," said Professor Stacy L. Smith, founder and director of the Inclusion Initiative, in a press release of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
"This is another example of what we see across the ecosystem of entertainment: Women are pushed to the margins or excluded from the creative process." he added.
"After a year in which women forcibly took hold of some of our most crucial cultural conversations, music is yet another arena where a handful of men are driving popular discourse," said Smith, noting that expanding the occupational ranks and influence of women behind the scenes in entertainment is imperative to giving women equal voice in the public sphere.
