Where We Should Increase the Number of Female Musicians

During 2023-2024, the combined U.S. performances of works by Mozart and Beethoven (137) by major ensembles are just three fewer than all performances by women:

Male dominance is a concern.

Female Musicians

With men the norm, the female conductor and composer have been the anomaly.

On the upside, more women are leading top ensembles than in the past. This year at 20.8% of all U.S. conductors, it was 14% for 2022-2023.

But still, progress in presenting works by women has slid backwards from a rather low base:

Trying to reverse the trend, the people in charge of the Deutsches-Symphonie Orchester Berlin recently mandated a female presence in every program. As a result, a journalist that attended nine Deutsches-Symphonie Orchester Berlin performances said he heard 11 pieces by female composers.

Opinions though are mixed. Explaining her goal, the Berlin orchestra’s Director of Artistic Planning said, “What we’re doing is a journey of discovery. The selection process that happened with men throughout the centuries didn’t happen with women. It’s our social responsibility to make that happen now.” By contrast, a musicologist researcher told us that, “The problem with amplifying the voices of ‘women composers’ only as female voices is that it reifies the difference and ‘Otherness’ of these voices in a manner that simply reinforces the gender binary rather than dissolving it.”

Our Bottom Line: Expectation Bias

With an expectation bias, what you expect is what you get. (Because you expect it.)

The classic experiment came from a professor that labeled his rats smart and dumb. Told the smarter animals would perform on tests, his students gave them more affection. Receiving more attention, they became smarter. The students demonstrated that when their expectations shaped how they behaved, they wound up with a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Musicians’ expectation bias helped to explain why orchestras had few women until auditions obscured gender. The big question though is how to dissolve the gender binary while increasing the presence of female musicians.

My sources and more: Hearing that a German orchestra was including female composers in each concert, I recalled our blind audition story the rat expectation experiment, and these symphony statistics from Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy (WPA).