What Triple J’s ‘Girls To The Front’ Tells Us About The Aussie Music Industry’s Stubborn Gender Gap

International Women’s Day can be frustrating. Hundreds of articles about gendered disparity across infinite spectrums burst out of the internet like mayflies and die after one day. For the rest of the year, arguments about entrenched sexism are the province of feminist writers, women’s sites, and MRA tweeters.

A surprising addition to the mix this year was Triple J, which published ‘Girls To The Front’ on IWD last week. An exhaustive breakdown of the Australian music industry’s well-documented gender gap, ‘Girls To The Front’ was partly in response to the now-predictable yearly spike in articles about sexism at the national broadcaster’s alternative music station that accompanies every new Hottest 100, which almost invariably turns out to be a list of the hottest 100 dudes, plus a couple of women.

After suggestion by @LaurenBeldi (and in @CaseyBriggs’ shadow), I made this on the #Hottest100’s gender breakdown pic.twitter.com/lAEk7dURmO

— Wes Mountain (@therevmountain) January 26, 2016

 

In the last 20 years, it’s rare to find a Hottest 100 list where even one female artist has made the top ten. The backlash to this isn’t new and Triple J has been defending rather than acting on gender disparity for years. Back in 2013, manager Chris Scaddan claimed 29 percent of the Triple J playlist were female leads as evidence that Triple J supported gender diversity. Irritating, but not particularly surprising; it’s fairly well established that men perceive gender balance as equal when it gets to around 30 percent, and female-dominated when it’s actually equal.

Whatever the perception, numbers don’t lie, and Triple J’s gender balance hasn’t improved much. ‘Girls To The Front’ crunched the numbers on gender balance in the Aussie music industry with stats provided by APRA AMCOS (Australasian Performing Right Association and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society), an organisation with over 87,000 songwriters, composers and music publisher members on its books. As these takeaway stats illustrate, the gender gap is a long way from closing:

• 21.5 percent artists registered with APRA are women.
• 20 percent of indie labels registered with APRA are managed by women.
• 7 percent of jingle writers in the industry are women; 53 percent of children’s music writers are women.
• 33 percent of ARIA award nominees were women, or bands with at least one female member.
• 24 percent of Triple J’s hottest 100 this year by solo female artists, bands with permanent female frontwomen or acts where at least half of its members are women.
• None of Triple J’s top 10 songs of 2015 were by women, or bands that included women.
• 35-39 percent of the artists on Triple J, Double J and Unearthed playlists in 2015 were solo female artists or bands featuring women.
• 33 percent of Triple J’s feature albums in 2105 were artists with at least one woman.
• Music festivals in 2015 varied between 9 percent and 38 percent female representation in their line-up.

Triple J themselves reportedly managed almost 50/50 parity in their own in-house music employees, but didn’t provide any information on the gender split at different levels of seniority — I’d like to see that before handing them any milk and cookies. The ABC Charter requires “broadcasting programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian community”. Surely Triple J is in breach of that requirement with such a white male dominated playlist? Surely, when there are clearly such barriers to entry for women and people of colour, Triple J of all places should be required to address that? This is far from the first time those questions have been asked, but we’ve yet to hear a sensible answer.

It’s difficult to understand the reason for all this. Unless I’ve been severely misinformed, penises don’t sing and testicles don’t compose. But numbers don’t lie – being a man is lucrative. If you’re thinking this all sounds fairly bleak, you’d be right – it is. Music, like media, law, medicine, science, politics and well, pretty much everywhere, is dominated by men, particularly at the senior, successful end.

Apparently it’s not all bad news — 46 percent of APRA nominations were for solo female artists or bands with at least one woman, and 40 percent of J Award nominations were for the same. Twice, TWICE, women managed to break the thirty-something percent barrier, and the gender divide on the APRA membership list has closed by 3.8 percent since last year.

But are we really meant to celebrate a 3.8 percent advance? In the short term, no. A few more percentage points in an industry rife with sexual harassment and so utterly dominated by men is not a victory. But maybe it’s a tiny step towards it. Yes, these numbers prove the terrible state of gender equality in the music business, but the fact that they were counted at all, and that they provoke such a reaction, is an indication of change over the longer term. Would it have occurred to anyone to crunch those numbers 50, even 20 years ago? Would anyone have cared?

It’s only been 114 years since white women were given the vote in Australia, 50 years since married women were barred from working, less than 50 years since Aboriginal women were allowed to vote and 27 years since marital rape was criminalised in Queensland. We’ve made more change to women’s lives and expectations in the last 200 years than we did in the last 5,000. Change, when you’re sitting (underpaid) in the eye of the storm, happens agonisingly slowly, but when you look back through the longer lens of history, it’s been remarkably fast.

This may not feel like comfort to the women who can’t push through all the barriers men have built along the road to success, nor should it. Being denied opportunity simply because you’re a non-penis owner is enraging, and women must continue to be angry about it. Loudly, publicly, unavoidably, intimidatingly angry. And yes, if we have to keep having this argument every year, we will. If we have to keep saying that the tiny three-percent steps forward are not enough, we will. If we have to keep insisting that the national broadcaster live up to the requirements of its charter, we will. And if it takes another 20 years to drag the music industry, kicking and wailing, out of the ludicrous assumption that only men make good music, we’ll keep pushing for 20 years, because change might take too long to happen, but it won’t happen at all unless we keep fighting for it.

I hope the men running the music business are running scared. I hope they can see the end coming and are frightened by its inevitability. I hope they realise that the people who want to hear female artists are going to keep talking, writing, yelling, protesting, disrupting and refusing to back down. Because that’s how we achieved as much as we have in the last 150 years, and it’s how we’ll keep it going for the next 150 years.

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Jane Gilmore is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. Blog: janegilmore.com. Twitter: @janetribune.