Male / Female Ratio In Your Record Collection

Two major points though: a) I don't consciously choose music on the basis of fancying band members, and b) It's almost impossible for a woman not considered attractive to get far (with the possible exception of punk, which is very often form over pleasure) .

Which is a fucking shame.

I see we're listening to lots of Placebo?

I think we're good enough friends that you can call me Martin, Tracer. Also, I cannot call you Hand because I have a friend of that name (mentioned in the thread for praising Andrew Littlefield, as it happens). Anyway, no, I'm afraid it isn't something I record, so I cannot give any kind of accurate figure. However, a quick look through the 100 acts by whom I have most music suggests my collection may be as much as 90% male.

Most of those would fall into the Proto-Punk / Punk / Post-Punk / New Wave / Indie / Alternative and Soul / R&B / Funk sections though; the % is much lower in the Jazz, Psych / Prog and Reggae sections.

Not that I keep my collection in "sections" of course - alphabetical is about all I can cope with.

Mine has been steadily getting less female-dominated and more equal for the past few years. I'd like to think it's roughly 50-50 now. I think I still listen to the women more, but then I have just listened to Eminem, Dizzee Rascal and Maximilian Hecker so maybe not.

Why?

Personally I think you'd have to operate a very strict policy of "positive" discrimination in most genres to get even as high as 30%.

I don't buy the "relatively small amount" thing anyway. They're not as well-publicised, true, but since when has that been a problem for the obscurist indie kid?

Funny... seems like my collection is MOSTLY 'other'... the fact that there's been debate over what in fact constitutes a girl or boy band these days makes me think even the most exact estimate possible of the gender makeup of the average ILX music collection probably shouldn't terrify anybody. It's the same as literature: nowadays I think there are more chances than there used to be. It was bad that there weren't chances before. But does that mean because you don't want to be a misogynist you have to ignore musical history? "I only buy recordings made after the Riot Grrl movement... screw Mozart, that Nazi!"

And what about classical composers prior to the 20th century, or the middle of the 20th century? It would hardly indicate a particular individual's misogyny if there are virtually no female composers in such a collection.

I think if I were to buy the experimental/avant-garde music that interests me most from the last 40 or so years, there might be a better gender balance. (Some of my favorites in that category are women who aren't particularly widely known, like Ann MacMillan, the musique concrete composer or Annea Lockwood who also more or less works in that area.)

Aaah well, you see, I think I can confidently say that I have more CD's by female artists than you have CD's - although of course size isn't everything! ;~)

As I hinted in my original post 'though, I'd probably agree that 10% is pretty sensible for Punk / Post-Punk / New Wave / Indie / Alternative. I'd guess about the same for Folk and Rap and probably higher than that for vocal jazz, R&B / Soul and Chart Pop.

When you start moving into a lot of other genres (eg. Avant-Garde Jazz, Glam, Grunge, Heavy Rock, Heavy Metal, Proto-Punk, Psychedelia, Prog, Reggae, etc. etc. etc.) 'though, female artists represent a lot lower proportion of what's out there.

However this does mean that the further back and (I would suggest) the further from the current mainstream your musical tastes / collection extends, the higher the ratio of male : female within that collection is likely to be.

And what would Walter/Wendy Carlos be?

Exactly... if I thought that most people on this board were classical/jazz fans first and foremost, it's not a relevant criticism at all. But this is ILM ;)

I'd probably agree that 10% is pretty sensible for Punk / Post-Punk / New Wave / Indie / Alternative. I'd guess about the same for Folk and Rap and probably higher than that for vocal jazz, R&B / Soul and Chart Pop.

Stewart, I agree with you about the "other genres", but 10%? For folk? And indie? And 'alternative'? Most of my folk CDs are by women... and the fact that genres like punk and indie *used* to be male-oriented has been largely compensated by the huge influx of women since they stopped being so male-oriented.

I must take issue with "the fact that genres like punk and indie *used* to be male-oriented" 'though - as far I'm concerned punk was a significant factor in increasing the number of women involved in music!

You're right... and this would actually be a contribution to my argument ;)

After all, this is IL_M_!

I'm sorry but I honestly don't see how. Punk was my era - I've got something (in most cases everything by all the usual female suspects from that era: Action Pact; Au Pairs; Avengers; Bags; B52's; Blondie; Body Snatchers; Bow Wow Wow; Bush Tetras; Crass; Delta 5; Destroy All Monsters; Edith Nylon; Essential Logic; Flying Lizards; Girls At Our Best; Nina Hagen; Holly & The Italians; Kleenex / LiLiPUT; Lene Lovich; Lydia Lunch; Martha & The Muffins; Mo-dettes; Penetration; Plasmatics; Pretenders; Raincoats; Rezillos / Revillos; Runaways; Selecter; Shirts; Siouxsie & The Banshees Slits; Patti Smith; Snatch; Stinky Toys; Toyah; Vice Squad; X; X-Ray Spex; Young Marble Giants... (did I miss anyone important?!?) and it still doesn't add up to much more than 10% of my collection from that era!

The only genre I really associate with a high proportion of female singers is sixties pop: and there the tools of manufacture are not often in the hands of the workers - beyond Carole King we are not exactly female-songwriter rich - and therefore it feels sort of counter-revolutionary if you are trying to make a Grand Statement about being pro-Girls In Music. Mr Osbourne's list of punk bands what have girls in has piqued my interest, though. Thank you for that!

What about current chart pop and r&b, cis? (see my attempt to revive a crappy old thread of mine, above)

With r'n'b... eh, that was a bit of an oversight. Especially considering that I cannot stand male-sung r'n'b unless it's R Kelly's Ignition (remix).

But I don't buy chartpop and r'n'b to the same extent as I do indie (today's def: mostly-unattractive young men singing about how pretty and/or mean girls are), because I don't need to: it's on the radio, it's on the telly, the album tracks are nowhere near as good as the singles, why not wait for the best of? Indie has to be bought because there's no way I'd be able to listen to it otherwise; plus quasi-rockist 'pop is ephemeral, indie forEVAH'. So the music I love that's fifty-fifty male:female doesn't join my record collection unless there's a sale on, but the music with a masculine bias just piles up.

Most of my collection is male, so that makes me hate women, right?

Most of my collection is made by white artists, so that makes me a racist, right?

It does?

Okay, just checking.

cis - plus chartpop and r'n'b is peasy to download and they're all rich anyway so we don't care about not buying the records.

A few years ago I had practically mo music primarily made by women, but you're not describing me.

It's not as if there's any shortage of fantastic music made by women out there, in pretty much all genres.
-- The Lex (alex_macpherso...), August 4th, 2003.

D'oh!

Death Metal, Grindcore, Stoner, Techno nad the whole 'ANGRY!!!!' genre.

Plus classical music for the last x hundred years - the 'authors' are the composers, any good women ones?
(There are probably reasons why women didn't get to excel in the classical field, but the fact is they didn't).

Revive.

As far as production credits go, about 99-point-something percent male

Since the last couple of years, it would seriously not be an exaggeration to say 98% female (counting women fronting bands with men as well, of course). Before that, it was around 50-50 so I'd say about 80% female overall.

For some reason unknown to me I simply cannot stand most male voices nowadays (esp in indie). I don't know when this started, and I don't know if it was a reaction against male fronted indie bands or what. But even a lot of male voices I used to like, I dislike now.

about 50% with at least one female member. probably half those either all-girl or with a prominent female member (either lead singer or main songwriter).

OK, I had to rely on the CDs/MP3s I've accumulated at work over the past 6 months, but it's still fairly representative of my listening habits in general.

I didn't count artists of whome I have only 1 mp3 that I've clearly d/l'd somewhere (UNLESS it was a DJ mixtape of over an hour's length in which case I counted the gender of the DJ) and I didn't count artists I have only on compilations.

Solo artists were easy, bands were harder to figure out.

My rules of what constituted a "female-containing band" were as follows:
-Any band containing 2 or more females was counted as F
-if a band contains only 1 woman, then it depends on
1) if the woman is a named songwriter the band is F
2) if the woman is a lead singer on a significant number of songs, the band is F
3) if the woman plays an instrument which is substantial in the sound of the band, the band is F (so Boris, having a female guitarist would be counted as F, a all-male psych band with a female tambourine player or backing vocalist is M)
4) having Carol Kaye as your bass player for a male solo or vocal group doesn't count, OK? (goodbye Beach Boys)
5) having Delia Derbyshire as producer does count (Hello BBC Radiophonic Workshop)

55% female
45% male

As a woman, kind of horrified to consider a) how male-dominated my listening is (must be well over 90%), and b) how it's getting worse (indie rock brought me to plenty of female-led bands and 50/50 duos in the 90s, but I can think of much fewer I've discovered in the 00s and still fewer from the past few years to hit the same level of cool but not totally obscure)

(cool but not totally obscure = in '98, if you read the music press at all you would've been at least aware of, say, Stereolab, Broadcast, Quickspace, Sleater-Kinney, but probably not think of them as sell-outs. a lot of the bigger female-containing indie bands of the 00s seemed to get dismissed as sold out/uncool/generic/Pitchfork almost instantly - thinking here of e.g. Rilo Kiley, Metric, Pretty Girls Make Graves - and the next level of slightly more obscure/hip bands just doesn't seem to contain women to anything like the same extent as the 90s.

maybe this perceived difference in cred level is just because I got old and jaded though. plus I know I'm a little blinkered here, as I've headed away from the vocal indie bands that were most of my 90s listening, ended up listening to more electronic and instrumental stuff than anything else. I think the only "female band" I've seen this year is Nisennenmondai.)

just counted the last 10 songs on shuffle, 60% female to 40% male by Kate's criteria, which are pretty generous really.

To be fair, the last Rilo Kiley album did scream "SELL OUT", it just didn't have the tunes to back it up.

I think I'm about 25% F/75% M. My collection mostly consists of 50% hiphop (own major lady albums i.e. rah digga, latifah, mc lyte, foxy brown, lil kim, salt n pepa, eve, the fact that i can name these on my fingers and toes is v. depressing) when male v. female just doesn't compare and then 50% indie/pop/r&b/soul/etc. pushing the numbers up to about 25%.

Someone needs to do a last fm plugin which calculates your listening by gender.

random itunes sample came out about 70–30 M–F, which is probably a fair reflection of the collection as a whole.

these days, I tend to much prefer female voices to male. and women's lyrics tend to be the only ones I'll pay any attention to - not out of any kind of conscious decision, just observation after the fact.

mind you, most of the male voices I like are pretty much RRRRRRRRAAAAAGGGGHHHHBWWWOOAAAAR anyway, so lyrics are moot.

and the figure above does include several artists about whom I actually have no idea about the gender/height/hairstyle/BMI of the lineup/writers/performers, but that I'm assuming to be male just on a genre basis (prog, death metal, gnawa, klezmer, etc.).

I have just realised that those stats I listed above are kinda slanted. Did it again, based on my top 20 most listened last.fm artists - 17 out of 20 are female-containing. (probably only 16 out of 19 if you count Ellen Allien and Ellen Allien & Aparat as the same artist - actually, Selda and Selda w/Mogollar probably faces a similar thing)

85% female
15% male

Oops.

wouldn't even know where to begin with quantifying this, requires drawing some fairly arbitrary lines

lolz which category is Genesis P. Orridge for ex.

or for another ex., I have no idea (and no real way of finding out) how many female session musicians are playing in orchestras on various backing tracks, but by Kate's rule if there's more than 2 its a female band...

or what about someone like the Dirtbombs, that's had female members come and go throughout their career (setting aside the issue of whether playing fuzz bass is a "significant" part of their sound - I mean its def. significant in my opinion but calling them a female band seems kinda weird)

you guys need to have a +1F for clearly female dominated bands, a +1M for clearly male dominated bands, and +0both (or +1both) for shared-duty bands. there you go.
genesis p. is prob. male, but throbbing gristle is +1 or +0both, I'd say.

there ya go!

For some reason unknown to me I simply cannot stand most male voices nowadays (esp in indie)

Cause indie male voices are whiny and grating. 90% of the singers have no business doing that shit in public.

Lines are too arbitrary for me as well - so much of what I listen to does not involve self-contained rock and roll bands. And why prioritize certain kinds of participation over others?

Examples of fundamental levels of female participation that probably would not "count" as female:
Lots of 12"s on BPitch and Mobilee by male artists but female label owners (and someday my collection will have loads of DJAX)
Carol Kaye is, for me, the second most important person involved in Pet Sounds (sorry Hal)
Carol Kaye played uncredited on a lot of Motown (really Carol has to be one of the coolest people, male or female, in all of pop)
Timbaland routinely employs a female mix engineer (and this is a VERY important job in pop music)

Obviously there has to be a line somewhere but...

my record collection up to my early 20s = 95% male
new purchases over the last 20 years have been pretty evenly split

I feel like Stephen Colbert when I say this but really I don't "hear" gender in a lot of music and I never have. if its interesting and sounds good I like it, I don't care what chromosomes are involved really, and dithering about whether, say, Spiritualized "counts" as a female band seems kinda pointless

I have never once considered gender in my music purchases/downloads. I'm not sure this matters at all.

yeah me neither.

and I don't really need to take some kind of detailed inventory of my collection to know that the music business, like much of the world, is totally sexist and is dominated by males and that that is by and large unfair and undesirable.

same
xpost to brian

no idea what the percentage is. Its not something I've ever thought about, im guessing its male dominated.

I like female voices in rock or most music but usually not in dance music as i dont like the diva type of vocal that's so ubiquitous . Nor do i have time for mariah or celine. But i doubt I'd care for male equivalents of them either

Carl: Seinfeld... Oh yeah, funny white guy, right?

George: Jerry? Yes, I suppose he is white. You know, I never really thought about it. I don't see people in terms of color. You know, there's someone I'd like you to meet.

I like female voices in rock or most music but usually not in dance music...

xpost:
got me wondering where Sister Sledge, for example, fits into this thread. obviously, Chic were their auteurs...
my ratio would be low, but my love of Ella, Joni, P.J., Sleater-Kinney, LiliPUT knows know bounds!

Hmmm I like chic.

Looking at my top twenty last.fm charts I'm at 45% female. These are all artists in which a female has major input(or sole input) in the songwriting (assuming the girl in the XX helps write the songs). Thats less than I thought it would be.

Hmmm I like chic
xpost:
judging by your handle you damn well better!!(insert winking emoticon). it bugs me that they're most remembered for "Dance, Dance, Dance" and "Le Freak", the latter is not even a song really, and the other is good, not great, compared to a lot of their other stuff

About 80/20 in favor of male songwriters/singers/bandleaders/etc. May explain the defensiveness deej noted, I dunno...

Well, Chic are certainly remembered for a lot more than a coupla hits around ILM way, judging by the number of threads I've seen over the years :)

two of my favorite bands are Quasi (currently 2 girls 1 guy) and Sin Ropas (1 girl 1 guy)

according to Sin Ropas myspace "Holy Broken" is out soon and they have four tour dates at the end of November.
and well Quasi's myspace says they have had a new album in the works since March 7th.

also no one has mentioned Lizzy Mercier Descloux in this thread yet

I know this thread isn't supposed to acknowledge every girl musician ever but I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Sundays either

Some of my best friends are women!