Not long ago a student wrote a paper for me studying gender disparity in the music profession. Her project stunned me and left me shaken. I work hard to understand statistical findings, but she presented a statistic that simply took my breath away: 0 women conducting major symphony orchestras in Canada. That’s right,
Zero.
When she presented this work to the class, I felt sad. I know how devastating that non-statistic is for a young woman in musical training. For the record, Wikipedia’s list of female conductors includes one female conductor in Canada, Lisette Canton of the Ottawa Bach Choir (1). And no one else. Why is it that all over the world there are women conducting symphony orchestras, but not in Canada? I would love to be corrected here. Really. Show me I’m wrong. I would love to write a supplemental post that profiles women conductors in Canada.
This is one of those situations that I have no control over. However, what I can do is raise the profile of women who appear in my own research. This afternoon I have gathered some statistics on the women in my book (excluding me, of course).
Works cited:
13 citations of single authored works by 8 women:
Carpenter (1967) (ch. 6)
Cumming (2000) (ch. 6)
Goldin Meadow (2003) (ch. 4, ch. 5)
Monson (1996) (ch. 4, ch. 6)
Saslaw (1996) (ch. 3)
Schmalfeldt (2011) (ch. 6)
Stevens (2012) (Intro, ch. 3, ch. 6, Concl.)
Winget (2008) (ch. 4)
Multiple authored works including women as they appear in the chapters:
Introduction:
Perri 6 & Bellamy (2012)
Chaffin, Imreh, & Crawford (2002)
Chapter one:
Ginsborg & Chaffin (2011)
Chaffin, Lisboa, Logan, Begosh (2009)
Chaffin, Imreh, Crawford (2002)
Chapter 2:
Coffey & Atkinson (1996)
Ginsborg & Chaffin (2011)
Chaffin, Lisboa, Logan, Begosh (2009)
Chaffin, Imreh, Crawford (2002)
Demos, Lisboa, Begosh, Logan, Chaffin (2018)
Perri 6 & Bellamy (2012)
Chapter 5:
Perri 6 & Bellamy (2012)
Chapter 6:
Davidson & Goode (2002)
Williamon & Davidson (2002)
Zamm, Pfordresher, & Palmer (2014)
Clark & Marshall (1981)
Clark & Brennan (1991)
Clark & Krych (2003)
Loehr & Palmer (2011)
Conclusion:
Varela, Thompson, & Rosch (2016)
The performing musicians who appear in my book are not identified for privacy reasons. However, the music duo whose rehearsals I studied is gender balanced, and the orchestra whose master class series I studied had the following gender distribution:
Male: 2nd violin, bassoon, contrabassoon, trombone, bass trombone, clarinet, tuba, flute/piccolo, oboe, percussion, French horn, viola, trumpet, double bass, timpani
Female: cello, harp, cor anglais, 1st violin, harp
There you have it. Fifteen men and five women from one orchestra produced the masterclasses that were analyzed in my research. They are all fabulous musicians.
When I do research, I don’t use gender as part of the decision-making on whether or not to cite a work, or to measure how I might position myself with respect to the ideas in those works. I include research that helps me think carefully about the issues I am interested in, sometimes in agreement, sometimes in disagreement. One of the male authors I have cited quite a bit is someone whose work I disagree with often – not because I do not like him, but because the way he presents his ideas helps me articulate why I think about my topic differently than he does. However, I do notice that single authored works by men make up the bulk of the synthesized material for the conceptual framework I have designed for the study of cognition in musical activity.
Sometimes when I create a syllabus with readings for a class, I do use gender as a criteria for selecting readings because I would like to normalize female authorship for my students. Discourse studies of gender norms in scholarly positioning is worth pursuing, but that is for another post.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_classical_conductors
2. The digital radio station Classic FM has some more graphs that demonstrate gender inequality in the music business: https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/latest/gender-inequality-american-orchestras/