The numbers dip further in the behind-the-scenes of the industry. In 2019, 14.4% of songwriters were female, compared to 11.6% in 2018 and 11.5% in 2017 — which moves the eight-year average only slightly upward, to 12.5%. The same narrative – if not a worse one – emerges in other parts of the industry: Women comprised just 5% of producers in 2019, taking the eight-year average to 2.5%.
“The qualitative portion really illuminates that being female is, in and of itself, a barrier facing women navigating the space. A lot of what we are seeing is just a rinse and repeat of what we saw last year,” the study’s lead author Stacy Smith, a communications professor who founded the university’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, toldin 2019.
USC’s Annenberg report points out that the 2020 slate of Grammy nominees sets a new high for female nominees, with 20.5% of nominations in the top five categories going to women, compared to 8% in 2018 and 7.9% in 2013. It also attributes the uptick in women working on top projects in the music business partly to the Recording Academy’s Diversity and Inclusion task force, which sprang up in almost
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