Gender Audit

The latest data for concerts including my music

Some basic num­bers

  • Num­ber of works pro­grammed — Total: 511
  • Works by male com­posers: 393 (76.9%)
  • Works by fe­male com­posers: 117 (22.8%)
Break­down of works per­formed by com­poser gen­der
  • Num­ber of con­certs — Total: 83
  • All-male pro­grammes: 25 (30.1%)
All-male con­cert pro­grammes
  • Works pro­grammed — Total: 6.1
  • Works by male com­posers: 4.6
  • Works by fe­male com­posers: 1.3
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 22.3%. That amounts to a drop in rep­re­sen­ta­tion of 9.71% in the 15 years since my Mas­ters grad­u­a­tion.

Gen­der & Age

Ex­pe­ri­ence sug­gests that age plays a fac­tor in gen­der im­bal­ances: namely that while both gen­ders might be rep­re­sented in a spe­cific con­text, women may have to work harder and longer for the same op­por­tu­ni­ties, or are de­layed in ca­reer pro­gres­sion by var­i­ous so­ci­etal hur­dles, and so reach equiv­a­lent ca­reer points later than their male col­leagues. Un­for­tu­nately, this is very hard to quan­tify with­out more de­tailed re­search — eval­u­at­ing ca­reer pro­gres­sion prop­erly would be very com­plex.

Mea­sur­ing av­er­age age at time of per­for­mance is one op­tion, but this seems to be in­dica­tive of rather lit­tle (29.1 for women; 37.1 for men) — the av­er­age age for male com­posers prob­a­bly skews high thanks to more per­for­mances of works by older, es­tab­lished com­posers (even more likely to be male than pro­grammed com­posers in gen­eral); and per­haps the av­er­age for fe­male com­posers skews low given the higher num­ber of fe­male com­posers in stu­dent con­texts in this set of data (see ‘Ca­reer pro­gres­sion’).

To try to un­der­stand this bet­ter, one might con­sider the typ­i­cal age dif­fer­ences within in­di­vid­ual con­certs. In other words, are fe­male or male com­posers likely to be older or younger in com­par­i­son to the other com­posers on the same pro­gramme? On av­er­age, fe­male com­posers are 0.10 years younger than the con­cert av­er­age, with male com­posers 0.05 years older. Again, I’d sug­gest the data is cur­rently in­suf­fi­cient: just 34 of 83 con­certs are being taken into ac­count here with com­plete age data; and the sam­ple is too bi­ased to pro­vide any in­sights.

An overview of all the con­certs

Pro­por­tion of works by fe­male com­posers for every con­cert
  • Just 8 con­certs (of 83) have fea­tured a pro­gramme where half or more of the works are by fe­male com­posers.
  • On av­er­age just 22.8% of works played are by fe­male com­posers.

There are 22 con­certs miss­ing pro­gramme data. These are ig­nored en­tirely in the sta­tis­tics above.

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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