Abstract
Jazz is remarkable among genres in emerging from marginalised communities to a position of status, and is also evidently male-dominated in terms of both audiences and musicians. Using the Taking Part surveys of cultural participation in England, we investigate the gender gap in jazz and how it compares with classical and rock. We find women are less likely to attend jazz concerts than men. We also report on a unique dataset of 983 musicians, and identify how the position of women in the jazz network differs from men. Women also feature lower recording productivity, an effect appearing to work directly rather than mediated by instrumental choice or period of birth. We argue that equality of access to cultural advantage requires that we attend to how gender inequalities operate within genres, both to inform measures for debiasing and also to uncover mechanisms of gender inequalities which may hold in other contexts.
Highlights
During its early growth in the first decades of the twentieth century, jazz was perceived by much of American and British society as marginal and was certainly subcultural
Classical music attendance generally exhibits a gender gap in favour of women, while jazz and rock have gender gaps in favour of men for almost all cohorts
The gender gap is largest in favour of men for those born during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, narrowing substantially for those born in the 1950s and early 1960s
Summary
During its early growth in the first decades of the twentieth century, jazz was perceived by much of American and British society as marginal and was certainly subcultural. It is conceivable that some cultural forms attract audiences primarily made up of women who prefer to consume cultural products created by men; others, men who prefer to observe women; and still others men or women who prefer genres which tend to represent artists of the same gender. Such examples of gender homophily and heterophily (for example, the popularity of boy bands with young women, or opera divas with male audiences) is clearly evident at the level of the individual production or act. Prior gender specificity begets more specificity, which may be limiting for those working within the genre and for audiences alike
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