USC study finds men are overrepresented in GRAMMY Awards

A new report from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism released Thursday found a wide imbalance in the gender representation of male and female GRAMMY Award nominees. Since 2013, a total of 90.7 percent of nominees have been male.

The study, conducted by USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, looked at the representation of gender in GRAMMY Award nominees as well as racial and ethnic groups in the music industry. Photo from iStock.

Compiled by USC Annenberg professor Stacy L. Smith and members of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, “Inclusion in the Recording Studio?” marked their first study to examine the racial and gender breakdown in the music industry.

The study focused on GRAMMY nominations for Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Producer of the Year and Best New Artist. Researchers also evaluated the race and gender representation among the artists, songwriters and producers across 600 popular songs on the Billboard Hot 100 year-end charts from 2012 to 2017.

“The voices of women are missing from popular music,” Smith said in a USC News release. “This is another example of what we see across the ecosystem of entertainment: Women are pushed to the margins or excluded from the creative process.”

After examining the 600 most popular Billboard songs, 22.4 percent of the performers were female, but 2017 marked the all-time low in the six years the study took place, with female representation among the popular artists on the top charts at 16.8 percent. The study also revealed that women are more likely to receive credit as solo artists than be a part of a duo or band.

Female songwriters and producers were also found to be outnumbered by men, with a gender ratio of 49 males to every female producer for the 300 most popular songs.

“Women are rarely credited as the creative force behind popular music,” Smith said in a USC News release. “The lack of female songwriters and producers means that the epidemic of invisibility we have catalogued for women in key creative roles in film and television extends to music.”

The report also studied the percentage of artists from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in the industry. The results demonstrated more proportional representation with the U.S. population. Among artists from underrepresented groups across the six-year time period, 42 percent of artists were female, while 40.2 percent of female songwriters were from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. 

The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative plans to continue to collect more data to explore how to lessen the disparities in the music industry as a whole.

“Our goal is to work with industry members and companies to continue to explore this topic, leveraging the theoretical and empirical knowledge of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative to address exclusion and create large-scale systemic change,” Annenberg Inclusion Initiative board chair Leah Fischman said in the USC News release.