In the history of music, sisters have always been doing it for themselves.
The first female composer according to the history books was Kassiani, an 8th Century nun, who composed Byzantine chants.
However, women have rarely been given the same accolades and recognition as their male counterparts, and have often faced greater challenges to have their voices heard.
In this overview, we look at who is the most successful woman in music, what percentage of musicians are female, and why it’s still challenging for women to be successful in the music industry.
Plus, we’ve profiled the most revolutionary, pioneering, influential and unique female artists, composers and producers through history.
Load up our Kick Ass Women playlist for inspiration as you read…
Is the Music Industry Female-Dominated?
How equal is the music industry? The figures are, to say the least, dispiriting.
The USC Annenberg Inclusions Initiative came to the conclusion that, ‘women are missing in the music industry.’ Their research looked at 900 popular songs on Billboard’s annual Hot 100 charts from 2012 to 2020, together with Grammy nominees within the same timeframe (mainly focusing on Record of The Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Producer of the Year and Best New Artist.)
Releasing their findings in March last year, the report’s Stacy L. Smith declared that, ‘It is International Women’s Day everywhere, except for women in music, where women’s voices remain muted. While women of colour comprised almost half of all women artists in the nine years examined, there is more work needed to reach inclusion in this business.’
Women represented just 21.6% of all artists on the Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Charts across the past nine years and only 20.2% of artists on the chart in 2020.
The 2020 percentage shows that there has been no meaningful and sustained increase in the percentage of women artists in nearly a decade.
Few women appeared on the chart in duos (7.1%) or bands (7.3%) and were most likely to perform as solo artists (30%). Across 900 songs, the ratio of male artists to female was 3.6:1.
In 2020, 12.9% of songwriters were women – a ratio of seven men to every one female songwriter.
Shockingly, across a nine-year sample, 57.3% of songs didn’t feature any women songwriters. If you just take 2020, then 65% of songs didn’t feature a single female songwriter.
It’s even worse if you’re looking at production: women held only 2% of all producing positions across the 2020 Billboard Hot 100 songs.
The Recording Academy’s Women in the Mix pledge would seem to have had absolutely zero effect: only four women producers were credited on the 2020 Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Chart — none of whom worked with one of the 38 pledge-takers who had a song on the chart.
Notably, Ariana Grande was the sole pledge-taker to work with a woman engineer — herself — of those who appeared on the chart. It stands in stark contrast to the levelling up that’s been seen in terms of female film directors in the last few years.
The gender gap at the Grammys remains enormous, with only the Best New Artist category achieving anything near parity (45.5% of the nominees were women from 2013-2020).
Women’s share of nominations has increased over the years that the study has been tracking the data, but even in 2021, only 28.1% of all nominees in the five categories studied were women.
As you’d probably expect, it’s no better within management: the report revealed that of 4,060 music executives surveyed, women made up only 35.3% of C-suite executives.
How Can the Music Industry Create More Roles for Women?
In a feature for Rolling Stone, Desiree Perez, the CEO of Roc Nation, suggested:
- Actively recruiting women for roles, including executive-level jobs
- Training opportunities to help women advance their careers
- Encouraging mentoring and support for women already in the field, such as networking events
- Start open conversations addressing issues of sexual harassment and ageism
Why Is It Hard for Women in the Music Industry?
Gender inequality is obviously rife across the industry. Independent digital music distribution company TuneCore’s 2021 survey of 401 women creatives, including artists, songwriters, producers and DJs – mostly from North America and Europe – revealed that a huge 64% named sexual harassment and objectification as a major issue that women face.
#MeToo may have created a lot of noise, and huge numbers of thinkpieces, but it seems very little has actually changed when it comes to women and music.
Another challenge that the respondents identified was ageism, cited by 38%. ‘The music industry wants female artists to be young – partly a symptom of the industry’s youth obsession, but also so that women become successful before they are presumed to decide to take on the role of motherhood,’ the study says.
The study also pointedly concluded that, ‘The issues, challenges and experiences highlighted in this report are not “women’s problems” to be solved just by women in the music industry.’ The Guardian’s Laura Snapes put forward suggestions including ‘a diverse array of female A&Rs and executives imagining more creative futures for women in pop’, together with more support for female rappers. And, taking on the point about men putting their weight behind the issue, ‘male artists stipulating that they will only play events with balanced bills.’
You can find gender imbalance throughout the whole eco-system of the music industry – we all may be inadvertently being steered towards consuming more music created by male artists.
Researchers at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain, and Utrecht University in the Netherlands published their survey in 2021.
Their analysis of 330,000 users’ listening behaviour over nine years showed a clear picture – only 25% of the artists ever listened to were female.
They revealed that, ‘When we tested the algorithm we found, on average, the first recommended track was by a man, along with the next six. Users had to wait until song seven or eight to hear one by a woman.’
Journalist Liz Pelly wondered whether streaming culture, ‘Is merely reflective of a relentlessly male-centric status quo, or if streaming is creating a data-driven echo chamber where the most agreed-upon sounds rise to the top, subtly shifting us back toward a more homogenous and overtly masculine pop music culture… Listening patterns are studied by playlist programmers, who privilege songs with high completion rates and delete those with high skip rates.’
Pelly spent a month listening exclusively to Spotify playlists and analysing the data. She found that 64.5 % of the tracks were by men as the lead artist, with 20% by women and 15.5% relying on collaborations between men and women artists. As she concludes, ‘I had merely been listening to what Spotify told me to listen to by way of its playlists… These playlists overtly contribute to the continued “othering” and marginalising of non-male artists.’
However, Spotify’s stats for 2021 definitely showed women on a roll and bucking these statistics – globally, the most-streamed song was Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Drivers License’; Rodrigo also came in at number four, with Dua Lipa’s ‘Levitating’ at number five.
Rodrigo’s Sour was the most-streamed album, with Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia coming in second; Doja Cat’s Planet Her took fifth place.
A Timeline of Women in Music History
It’s clear that there’s still a long way to go for the women of the music industry, but that’s all the more reason to celebrate the pioneers, the change-makers and the women who’ve defied expectations, sexism and ageism throughout their music careers.
Who are the names you need to know?
If you want to go really far back, then the BBC’s list of notable women in music included Hildegard von Bingen, whose music is now regarded among the best of the Middle Ages; not only that, she’s become a feminist icon to everyone from Grimes and Cerys Matthews, who played her music on her 6Music show.
However, in 1880 Chicago music critic George P. Upton wrote Women in Music, in which he argued that, ‘women lacked the innate creativity to compose good music’, due to their ‘biological disposition’.
Women at that time were mainly involved in music education and writing hymns and children’s music. As in literature, many female composers had to use pseudonyms or initials to hide the fact that they were women.
The big names of that era were Carrie Jacobs-Bond, Maude Nugent and Carrie Northly (writing under the name Caro Roma), who was one of the most popular composers of the Tin Pan Alley era.
The first female engineers working in music were ethnomusicologists.
These included Alice Cunningham Fletcher, who was one of the first women in her field and recorded the music of Native American tribes in 1895 – some of her recordings are in the Library of Congress.
Laura Boulton did her first research expedition to Africa in 1929, recording folk music and bird calls – over 50 years of her work are captured in over 30,000 recordings.
As for female producers, Afro-Puerto Rican music entrepreneur Victoria Hernandez started record label Hispano in 1927 and opened the first Latin music store in New York City in 1941 – now known as Casa Amadeo, it’s been operating longer than any other music shop in the city.
Canadian-American jazz record producer Helen Oakley Dance (1913-2001) worked in Chicago from the mid-1930s onwards, producing Duke Ellington among others; she was also a jazz journalist and music historian.
Revolutionary Female Musicians – 1930s-1950s
Known as the ‘Empress of the Blues’, Bessie Smith (1894-1937) was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, having been one of the most popular female blues singers of the 1920s and 30s.
Many of her lyrics dealt with poverty, inter-racial conflict and female sexuality and encouraged working class women to be independent and empowered.
It can be argued that women in music history were really put on the map by Jazz music, and many of the biggest names not only performed, but were also composers and producers.
Revolutionary jazz vocalist Billie Holiday became one of the first Black women to work with a white orchestra when she toured with Artie Shaw in the late 1930s.
One of her most famous songs is ‘Strange Fruit’, an anti-lynching poem, which was recognised by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Another Black pioneer from the era was Ella Fitzgerald, who became known as ‘The First Lady of Song’, winning 14 Grammys – she was the first Black woman to win one – recording more than 200 albums across a career lasting nearly 60 years, and fighting against discrimination.
Other accolades included the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her 1945 scat recording of ‘Flying Home’ was described by The New York Times as, ‘One of the most influential vocal jazz records of the decade… No one before Miss Fitzgerald employed the technique with such dazzling inventiveness’.
Ella was also a regular on the Ed Sullivan Show, which ran every Sunday from 1948 until 1971.
In an era when few opportunities existed for Black performers on national TV, Sullivan championed Black talent, featuring famous women in music including Dorothy Dandridge, Diahann Carroll, Mahalia Jackson, Eartha Kitt, Dinah Washington and his favourites, The Supremes, who appeared 14 times.
Of the famous female musicians who changed the world, surely singer, songwriter and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe has to be up there.
Often dubbed ‘The Godmother of Rock ‘n’ Roll’, she had a considerable influence on spiritual and popular music in the 1930s and 40s, going on to inspire Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Little Richard and Chuck Berry.
Some historians classify her fabulously raw 1944 track ‘Strange Things Happening Every Day’ as the first rock ‘n’ roll song ever recorded. The Guardian noted, on what would have been her 100th birthday in 2015, ‘With a Gibson SG in her hands, Sister Rosetta could raise the dead. And that was before she started to sing.’
Revolutions in music don’t just happen on stage; in 1942, Daphne Oram became a Junior Studio Engineer at the BBC and went on to establish the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958 (she was also Britain’s first full-time electronic music composer.)
Perhaps the most famous alumnus of the Radiophonic Workshop is Delia Derbyshire, whose legendary TV theme tune for Doctor Who remains as futuristic-sounding today as it did when it debuted in 1963.
Some have even argued that her work inadvertently invented British techno music. She talked about producing electronic sounds and otherworldly scores to Tomorrow’s World:
In the 1950s, female vocalists began to take centre stage, whether their backgrounds were in country, folk or popular music.
Peggy Lee started out as a background singer on Benny Goodman’s radio show, before writing and recording her own material – ‘Fever’ has been covered by everyone from Elvis to Madonna and Beyoncé, but it’s still Peggy Lee’s most famous song.
Country music star Patsy Cline is considered one of the most influential singers of the 20th century, despite a career that only lasted eight years, before she tragically died in a plane crash in 1963.
Her massive hits of the 1950s and 60s included ‘Crazy’ and ‘I Fall to Pieces’.
Famous Female Musicians in History – 1960s Onwards
Aretha Franklin, AKA the ‘Queen of Soul’, was the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
She topped Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time, with Mary J. Blige, in her appreciation for the singer, saying, ‘There is no one who can touch her. She is the reason why women want to sing.’
Aretha stands as the most-charting female singer in history; she began her recording career in 1960, aged just 18, and her extraordinary three-octave range came to define soul music.
Cher is a global icon as a solo artist, but in the 1960s, she was half of supercouple Sonny & Cher and at the forefront of hippy counter-culture, with huge hits including ‘I Got You Babe’, as well as solo hits such as ‘Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’ from 1966 and a Bob Dylan cover, ‘All I Really Want to Do’, which stayed in the US Hot 100 for three months.
Cher has now surfed the zeitgeist for over half a century, defying expectations at every turn. Her back catalogue includes everything from a rock tribute to Kurt Cobain (2000’s ‘The Fall (Kurt’s Blues)’) to a song specially written for her by Prefab Sprout’s Paddy McAloon, ‘The Gunman’ in 1995.
And who can forget her 80s heyday, with a guest appearance on Meat Loaf’s ‘Dead Ringer for Love’ and massive 80s power ballads such as Diane Warren’s ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’?
Another female artist who rose, triumphant, from the ashes of a doomed partnership, Tina Turner’s first hit duet, ‘A Fool in Love’ with husband Ike was released in 1960.
Their hits together included ‘River Deep – Mountain High’, ‘Proud Mary’ and ‘Nutbush City Limits’, and Turner became the first female artist – and the first Black artist – to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in 1967.
Ike and Tina parted ways in 1976, and Tina launched one of the greatest comebacks in music history with her 1984 multi-platinum album, Private Dancer.
‘What’s Love Got to Do with It’ won the Grammy for Record of the Year, and became her first, and only No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
She’s sold over 100 million records worldwide and received 12 Grammys, three Grammy Hall of Fame Awards and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Janis Joplin may have only lived to be 27, but her influence can been seen in everyone from Stevie Nicks to Florence Welch and Pink.
An electric stage presence was combined with emotional lyrics and she came to be dubbed the first queen of rock ‘n’ roll, despite only recording four albums in a four-year career.
Patti Smith has spent her life breaking down barriers – the ‘punk poet laureate’ has been everything from a poet and singer-songwriter to an artist, author and she’s now also a climate activist.
She wrote a hit with Bruce Springsteen and toured with Bob Dylan, whilst tackling sexism head-on, as she once explained. ‘In the early 70s, when I started playing rock and roll, there weren’t a lot of girls taking an aggressive stance, playing feedback, you know. I had trouble recruiting guitarists to play with me. They’d come in, see it was with a girl, and just leave.’
Having come up through the tough New York scene, she became a fearless performer, notable for her confrontational, physical style, and says of herself, ‘I refuse to be anybody’s poster child, I do things my own way’ – which is why she remains such an inspiration.
Her debut album, Horses, released in 1975, was revolutionary because, at the Observer noted, it ‘referenced a classic persona, that of the androgynous poet/rocker, and gave it an exciting twist: the poet/rocker in question was a woman.’
Blondie’s Debbie Harry also emerged from the New York scene and didn’t become famous until she was 31 – relatively old by pop star standards.
The band’s eponymous debut album came out in 1976; they had six No. 1 UK hits, including ‘Heart of Glass’, ‘Hanging on the Telephone’ and ‘Call Me’, and sold 40 million records.
Together with her career as Blondie’s frontwoman, Harry has also had a string of solo successes, as well as being an actor.
She paved the way for strong female artists from Madonna to Shirley Manson of Garbage and Sia, and musically she’s moved through genres including punk and new wave, worked with iconic Italian disco producer Giorgio Moroder, and, of course, scored the first US No. 1 single to feature rap, with ‘Rapture’.
Queen of Disco Donna Summer had a string of hits in the late 1970s, including ‘Love to Love You Baby’, ‘I Feel Love’, and ‘On the Radio’.
Her music has been referenced by everyone from Beyoncé, who sampled ‘Love to Love You Baby’ on ‘Naughty Girl’ to Jessie Ware, who hailed her as an influence on 2020 album What’s Your Pleasure, saying, ‘She just had this power and this femininity and flirtation I was so obsessed with.’
Summer’s discography also includes rock anthem ‘Hot Stuff’ and R&B, such as 1982’s Grammy-nominated ‘Love Is in Control (Finger on the Trigger)’, produced by Quincy Jones.
Who is the most successful woman in music? Well, you’d have to look to Her Madgesty, Madonna, as the major contender.
A Guinness World Record holder, she’s sold over 300 million records worldwide to date (only The Beatles, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson have sold more). Plus, her ‘Confessions’ tour in 2005 became the highest-grossing tour by a female artist.
It’s hard to believe the original Queen of Pop is now in her 60s, especially as she’s still releasing music, and switching genres according to the zeitgeist; not the norm for age-obsessed pop.
She’s a legend who changed the pop-culture game forever, exploding in the early 80s with the rise of video culture and courting controversy way before the social media age, with everything from the religious furore around the video for ‘Like a Prayer’ and her raunchy live shows, to her book of erotica, Sex.
In the pantheon of famous women musicians, without Madonna, we wouldn’t have Britney Spears or Lady Gaga: the mistress of self-invention has paved the way for generations of female stars.
She has plenty to say about the perils and challenges she has faced in her career, as well as a lack of female peers, in her Woman of the Year speech at the Billboard Women in Music awards:
Producer, songwriter, rapper and singer Missy ‘Misdemeanor’ Elliott started out in the early 90s as a member of R&B group Sista, then went solo in 1997 with Timbaland-produced album Supa Dupa Fly.
A trailblazing woman in hip hop, she was the forerunner for everyone from Cardi B to Megan Thee Stallion and is one of the richest female rappers in the world – not to mention being the first female hip hop artist to have been inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame.
Unpredictability is one of the defining characteristics of female musicians who manage to rise to the top and stay there.
Icelandic art-pop icon Björk was inspired by 90s London club culture, blending techno and industrial music to create her 1995 album Post and, along with her fabulous style (who can forget that infamous Oscars swan dress?) and amazing artwork, she effortlessly blended eclectic sounds such as the brutal ‘Army of Me’ and the offbeat, quirky ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’.
She’s always been at the forefront of the experimental, whether that’s via her music or her visuals over the course of her 35-year career, and is currently putting the final touches to her 10th album, due this summer.
Who has delivered some of the best female vocal performances of all time? We’d nominate Beyoncé, not least for her 2018 Coachella takeover. ‘Beychella’ marked the first time a Black woman had headlined the festival, and she performed for nearly two hours, joined on stage by 100+ performers.
She’s the most nominated and awarded woman in the Grammy Awards’ history – with 79 overall, and 28 wins.
Her ‘visual album’ Lemonade placed at No. 32 on Rolling Stone’s 2020 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list, as well as becoming the world’s best-selling album of 2016, and the film received four nominations at the Emmy Awards.
Artist, mogul, activist and more, on her 40th birthday Beyoncé told Harper’s Bazaar that, ‘I want to continue to work to dismantle systemic imbalances. I want to continue to turn these industries upside down. I plan to create businesses outside of music. My wish for the future is to continue to do everything everyone thinks I can’t do.’
Some of the most popular music by women has been from girl groups. From The Supremes to Destiny’s Child, Girls Aloud to Little Mix – who made history in 2021 by being the first female band to win the BRIT award for Best British Group – the game-changers were surely the Spice Girls.
Baby, Posh, Sporty, Scary and Ginger might have looked cartoony, but their Girl Power defined a shouty kind of feminism and they maximized their marketing worldwide.
Capitalising on ‘Spicemania’, they put their image on and endorsed everything from Pepsi to Walkers Crisps (starring in two TV ads alongside Gary Lineker) Chupa Chups to Spice Girls dolls and Spice World, a video game released for the PlayStation in 1998.
They became the most merchandised group in music history – bringing in over £300 million in 1997 – and took branding to a level that has rarely been matched since.
They even launched another ad campaign with Walkers to tie in with the Spice World 2019 tour.
The Guardian’s Sylvia Patterson went so far as to say that the group’s true legacy was that, ‘They were the original pioneers of the band as brand, of pop as a ruthless marketing ruse, of the merchandising and sponsorship deals that have dominated commercial pop ever since.’
The original influencers? You wouldn’t bet against it.
For additional support if you’re a woman in the music industry, the International Alliance of Women in Music (IAWM) is the world’s leading organisation devoted to the equity, promotion and advocacy of women in music, across cultures and genres. They work to increase the visibility and programming of music by female composers, and also to combat discrimination against women.
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