The Grammys aside, music is still a man’s world

The Grammys certainly have come a long way from 2018, when there was just one female winner during the main telecast.

If you were among the 16.9 million people who watched the Grammys on Sunday, you might reasonably surmise that sisters, as Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin so memorably put it, are doing it for themselves. The broadcast and the headlines were dominated by women, spanning several generations, from Joni Mitchell to Tracy Chapman, and from Miley Cyrus to 2-year-old Hazel Monet. 

Oh yeah, and Taylor Swift.

Strikingly, only two men made the Monday morning headlines — and one of them, Jay-Z, mainly for his shoutout to his wife, Beyoncé. The other was rapper Killer Mike, whose three awards were overshadowed by an altercation that led him to be hauled away in handcuffs by the LAPD before the broadcast.

The Grammys certainly have come a long way from 2018, when there was just one female winner during the main telecast: Alessia Cara, for best new artist. (As is often the case with awards shows, most Grammys are handed out off-camera.) Controversially,  then-CEO of the Recording Academy, Neil Portnow, responded by saying women needed “to step up” in order to score more awards.

The widespread outrage prompted by those comments was captured in the trending hashtag #GrammysSoMale. Portnow would subsequently apologise and, shortly thereafter, announce he would leave when his contract ended.

The #GrammysSoFemale hashtag hasn’t received as much attention, but there has been plenty of comments about how the awards night showcased women. “I think it is just wonderful to see so many women at the top,” Dua Lipa told the AP before the show.

She herself went home empty-handed, but women swept the four top categories — Album of the Year (Swift), Record of the Year (Cyrus), Song of the Year (Billie Eilish; her brother Finneas shared songwriting credits) and Best New Artist (Victoria Monet, Hazel’s mom).

Other standout women winners were SZA, Kylie Minogue, Coco Jones, Lainey Wilson and, in the new category of Best African Music Performance, Tyla. Women also won categories that have long been the preserve of men. Rock trio boygenius won three gongs, and Karol G became the first woman to win Best Música Urbana Album.

What explains the turnaround of the past six years? Some credit must go to the academy, which greatly expanded its voting membership since Portnow’s departure. Of the more than 2,400 music creators who joined the voting bloc recently, 50 percent are people of color, 46 percent are under the age of 40, and 37 percent are women. The current CEO, Harvey Mason Jr., reckons the increase in female nominees was “a direct result of a lot of the changes that we’ve been making at the academy.”

But, for all the progress on the show Sunday night, music remains very much a man’s world. According to the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which tracks diversity and inclusion in the entertainment business, women remain greatly underrepresented in the industry. This is especially true in the categories of songwriter and producer, where inclusion has improved only slightly.

Researchers at Annenberg note that women made up only 34.8 percent of the 164 artists who appeared in Billboard’s Hot 100 year-end chart for 2023. This is an increase from 30.2 percent in 2022. But of the 441 songwriters credited on that list, only 19.5 percent were women. And of 217 producers, the proportion of women is smaller still: 6.5 percent. Across the nine years and 1,972 producing credits that were studied, the gender ratio is 29.8 men to every one woman producer.

On Sunday night, men took both the Producer of the Year and Songwriter of the Year prizes for nonclassical music: Jack Antonoff and Theron Thomas, respectively. The producers nominated were all men; only one woman, Jessie Jo Dillon, was in competition for the songwriting prize.

The preponderance of male producers and songwriters put women at a severe disadvantage at the creative end of the industry. Men also dominate the business end, from publishing and distribution to managing artists. (This is not an American phenomenon: A new British parliamentary report says the UK music industry is a “boys’ club,”  which makes female artists vulnerable to misogyny and abuse.) In surveys of music professionals, the majority of respondents routinely complain of significant income inequality between the genders.

None of this is lost on the women artists at the awards show. “What we want is just an equal space in the industry and to be seen [on] equal levels — not just on the creative side but on the business side,” Dua Lipa said. “Hopefully, the equality in the industry will kind of level things out a little. I think we’re still kind of figuring that part out. But we’re getting there, slowly.”

It’s an area where the male-dominated industry needs to step up.

Bobby Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Views do not represent the stand of this publication. 

Credit: Bloomberg