LOS ANGELES (CNS) - A new USC study on gender and racial figures in pop music has found that 90.7 percent of Grammy Award nominees between 2013 and 2018 were male, meaning only 9.3 percent were women.
Stacy L. Smith, Marc Choueiti and Kate Pieper, of the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, tracked the gender and racial breakdown of performers, writers and producers across the top echelons of the pop charts and the Grammy Awards, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The full results of the work, titled ``Inclusion in the Recording Studio? Gender and Race/Ethnicity of Artists, Songwriters & Producers Across 600 Popular Songs from 2012-2017," was released today, a few days before the 60th Grammy Awards.
While one might suspect that an era seemingly dominated by major female stars such as Taylor Swift, Adele and Beyonce would have a more even split, the workaday figures for representation in pop music today remain startling in their male dominance, according to The Times. And in 2017, the figures seemed to be getting worse.
Women nominated for Grammy Awards were most likely to be recognized for best new artist or song of the year and least likely to be up for producer of the year. In the time period surveyed, not a single woman got a nod in that category.
The general figures of the gender breakdown in pop music show similar imbalances. In 2017, 83.2 percent of artists across the top pop songs were male and just 16.8 percent were women. That's a sharp drop-off from 2016, where women were the featured artist on 28.1 percent of the same charts or even from 2012 with 22.7 percent.
The numbers get even more skewed when looking specifically at musical groups rather than popular solo acts, according to The Times. For bands, the gender makeup was 91.3 percent male (70.5 percent of bands were all men), and for duos, 94.9 percent of members were male.
One slight upside: In 2017, slightly more than half of the top acts surveyed were from minority racial or ethnic groups. Specifically, 51.9 percent of acts surveyed were minorities, a figure 13.5 points higher than five years ago.
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