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Classical music’s women problem: ‘The gender ratio is appalling’

Whichever statistic you look at, equality in the industry is still a long way off. We explore a new drive to change that

Classical music has a gender problem. Pick almost any metric, and classical music’s gender statistics are dire. Only 7.5 per cent of orchestral music played worldwide is written by women. A 2022 study by the Independent Society of Musicians found that 66 per cent of respondents experienced discrimination working in music – 78 per cent of which was levelled at women, and 58 per cent of which was sexual harassment. Only 10 per cent of the highest-grossing films of 2023 had scores written by women. The list goes on.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Classical musicians today are dealing with centuries of sexism that has kept women on the margins. When Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own about the prejudices against creative women in 1929, she argued that musicians were in the worst position of all. In music more than in any other field, she wrote, the idea that “nothing could be expected of women intellectually” was still “active and poisonous in the extreme”. Those women who persevered found that their careers were bound by “wretched sex-considerations”, which composer and suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth described as the “fashioning factor” of her life.
Such considerations included women being barred from composition classes based on the belief that they were biologically incapable of composition, or being prevented from learning particular instruments, especially brass, because they were thought too physically feeble. Over a century on, and classical music still seems woefully behind the times, with norms that would be shocking in most other industries – whether it’s the lack of women composers on programmes, the small percentage of women in top jobs, the extraordinarily sexist language used by some critics to discuss stars like Yuja Wang, or accusations of sexual misconduct against prominent figures that have recently rocked the industry.
Combatting the legacy of these historical attitudes will take time, effort, and experimentation. The Leeds International Piano Competition, for example, has this year introduced new judging methods to encourage the inclusion of women, including “blind” shortlisting at the first round and unconscious bias training for jury members. 
Their CEO, Fiona Sinclair, explains that their action was prompted by the realisation that “only 18 per cent of the most recent top 40 international piano competitions have been won by women”, and that “the imbalance becomes even more marked at the very top level of the world stage where, across many of the leading festivals and venues around the world, male pianists continue to dominate.”
Programmes such as Women Conductors, which trains women conductors, prove that targeted interventions can lead to lasting change. Co-founded in 2014 by conductor Alice Farnham, over 500 aspiring conductors have participated in the workshops and many are now building careers as professional conductors. Olivia Clarke, for example, was named a Rising Star by BBC Music Magazine, and is conducting Rossini’s Il turco in Italia this month at Glyndebourne.
Leeds International Festival is hoping for this kind of long-term impact, and has introduced a £3,000 award named after pianist Alexandra Dariescu for the best performance of a work by a woman composer. As Dariescu says, while women musicians have historically been outnumbered by men, there is nonetheless a rich history of women’s composition and performance that is still being discovered.
“There’s something magical about opening an unknown score and finding real treasure”, says conductor John Andrews. He specialises in neglected British repertoire, and has led the premiere recordings of works including Ethel Smyth’s opera Der Wald and Elizabeth Maconchy’s Dialogue for Piano and Orchestra. He says these pieces are “a total musical delight” that “fill in a whole chapter of our national culture heritage that’s so easily forgotten. It’s like suddenly hearing another side of a conversation you’d only partially been aware of”.
Committing to gender equality doesn’t mean doing away with Beethovens and Bachs, and nor does it spell box-office disaster, as many detractors fear. In 2018, the BBC Proms signed up to the PRS Foundation’s Keychange initiative, pledging a 50:50 gender split on new commissions. The result has been record-breaking engagement statistics, with attendance up from 93 per cent in 2023 to 96 per cent in 2024.
It used to be difficult to programme music by historical women, because their names were little-known and scores were often unpublished, meaning that significant research and specialist knowledge was needed to play their pieces. This is changing, though, thanks to organisations including Her Ensemble, who aim “to address the gender gap and gender stereotypes in the music industry”, and DONNE, a charity providing resources “dedicated to achieving gender equality in the music industry”.
Nonetheless, some seasons are still programmed with very few women composers, or even none at all. The Royal Opera House’s 2024-2025 season, for example, features an opera installation by Hannah Conway, but otherwise no operas by women.
“Our repertory is planned over longer periods rather than specific seasons”, explains Oliver Mears, Director of Opera at the ROH, “meaning that there will be years when representation is higher or lower depending on artist availability, financial constraints, and the restaging of proposed productions from the 2020 and 2021 seasons.”
Sir Antonio Pappano, similarly, announced his first season as Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra including only one piece by a woman, Elizabeth Maconchy. When asked for comment, the LSO pointed to the inclusion of women composers in other areas of their programming outside of this series. “There are significant efforts to maintain representation of underrepresented groups across all aspects of the LSO’s output”, their press representative stated. “There may be an ebb and flow as to whether that is composers, soloists, and conductors”, noting that Pappano’s concerts feature “all female soloists”.
Classical music is at a turning point. Change is happening, but the inclusion of women can’t be a box-ticking exercise, and they should not disappear between one season and the next. Only when gender equity is seen as a necessary foundation for achieving excellence will classical music start to sound like an art form fit for the 21st Century.
Quartet: How Four Women Challenged the Musical World by Leah Broad is published by Faber & Faber
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