Sony Music and Warner Music published their UK gender pay gap reports, revealing a mean average gender pay gap in 2020 (as of April 5, 2019) of 26.0% and 31.5% at the two companies, respectively, Music Business Worldwide reports. It's slowly closing, but it's still a crevasse - last year it was 29.1% at Universal Music, 20.9% at Sony Music and 38.7% at Warner Music. The mean average ‘gender pay gap’ reflects what the average female employee earns versus the average male employee at each company.

Among artists 21.6% are women, 12.6% are songwriters, and 2.6% are producers - a new report on women inclusion in music by Annenberg shows (plenty of stats and graphs). Looking only at women of color, numbers go way lower - 9 of 1,291 producing credits went of to women of color.

The music industry has risen to meet the challenges of the pandemic, and Variety chose several women - artists and executives - who are leading the charge. They are UK pop star Dua Lipa, Natascha Augustin, Senior creative director in Warner Chappell Germany, K-pop stars Blackpink, Vanessa Craft, Director of content partnerships in TikTok Canada, and others...

A total of 1,971 women were registered as professional songwriters and composers in 2020 in the UK, a 12.3% year-on-year increase compared to 2019, and a near twofold increase (79.6%) compared to 2018, when 1,097 women registered, Music Week reports. New figures released today (8 March), International Women’s Day 2021, show over half (58%) of women joining PRS for Music in 2020 were under the age of 30. However, gender balance within the professional songwriter and composer community remains heavily skewed towards men - male composers and songwriters make up 81.7% of PRS for Music’s membership, which is significantly higher than the music industry as a whole. The proportion of women working in the music industry had reached a record high of 49.6% in its latest Diversity Report for 2020. Also, the top 10 highest-earning female songwriters and composers generated 70% less income than their male counterparts in 2020.

"Women rappers know that their mics will be taken at a certain age, that they’ll be rendered voiceless, especially if their beauty and power has faded. They alter their ages or don’t reveal them at all, because if that’s what will allow them to extend their shelf life in this young man’s game before being pushed out, then so be it. It is a game, right?" - Bitch Media says in the interesting article about ageism in hip-hop. Rapper Eve emphasizes how it's idiosyncratic to hip-hop: “When you look at rock or a lot of other genres, they never age out. Why is it that they’re allowed to get older? Why is it that rock or country or many other genres are allowed to literally make records until they die?…. With hip hop, there’s this attitude that you’re done at a certain age".

"We can’t in good conscience benefit from a process that has—both this year and historically—so overlooked women, performers of colors, and most especially Black performers” - Alastair Moock & Friends, the Okee Dokee Brothers, and Dog on Fleas wrote to the Recording Academy asking to rescind their nominations for the 2021 Grammy Award for Best Children’s Music Album. Three of the five nominees say that "it is not an aberration” that all of the 2021 nominees are white and only one nominee is female, Pitchfork reports.

For the first time since its inception in 2012, the nominees for best rock performance at this year's Grammys are all-female or female-fronted: Fiona Apple, Big Thief, Phoebe Bridgers, Haim, Brittany Howard, and Grace Potter. Women also dominated the best country album category - it is the first time it has had five albums helmed in whole or in part by women: Little Big Town, Ingrid Andress, Brandy Clark, Miranda Lambert, and Ashley McBryde, Variety reports. And yet another precedent - South Korean megastars BTS became the first K-pop act to receive a Grammy nomination. The boy band’s latest hit single, 'Dynamite', is competing in the best pop duo/group performance category, CNN reports.

The average gender pay gap as of April 5, 2019 at Sony Music UK was 26.0%, at Warner Music UK it was 31.5%, at Spotify UK it was 9.9%, and at Live Nation UK it was 44.5%, Music Business Worldwide reports. That's bad news, but still, it's less bad than in previous years. In 2017, the average gender pay gap across all three companies was 33.8% – with 29.8% at Universal, 22.7% at Sony and 49% at Warner.

Women made up only 12% of the songwriters responsible for writing the 700 songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 year-end charts between 2012 and 2018, which is in stark contrast to one-third of all musicians identifying as female, according to Variety. It gets even worse when looking at music producers - gender breakdown for music producers who worked on the top 400 popular songs from 2012, 2015, 2017, and 2018, found a men-to-women producer ratio of 47:1. That translates to only 2.1% of those producers identifying as female.

Glastonbury's first big line-up announcement features 52 per cent female or female-identifying acts (Taylor Swift, Diana Ross, Kendrick Lamar and Paul McCartney are headlining), and the NME loves it: "It is glorious, inspiring proof that the same old, tired excuses that still get trotted out by certain festival bookers don’t wash. Instead of moaning about how there aren’t 'enough female artists' or coming up with some face-saving, condescending scheme to give young female musicians 'a boost' and then seemingly forgetting all about it, Emily Eavis and her team have just surveyed the wealth of women making music right now and, you know, booked them. A novel idea!".

There are encouraging signs of change in the gender gap on the country radio:

Maren Morris’s 'The Bones' is the first song by a solo female to stay at the summit of Country Airplay for two weeks since 2012

For five consecutive weeks, there have been five female-inclusive acts in the Top 20 of the Country Airplay chart

For the last six weeks, women have co-written the No. 1 song

Should Andress’ 'More Hearts Than Mine' and Gabby Barrett’s 'I Hope' go to No. 1 on Country Airplay, it will mark the first time two women have taken their debut singles to No. 1 in a calendar year since 2001

According to new data from equality advocate Jada E. Watson, female artists occupied exactly 10 percent of the space available on country radio in 2019. That, Watson says, is "barely enough to be heard", and much lower than two decades ago. In 2000, on the 19 February 2000 chart, women made up 40% of the week’s top songs. Calculating the drop, the percentage of songs by women in the Top 20 declined 75% in the past 20 years.

TV host Samantha Bee devoted an entire segment of her show 'Full Frontal' to the lack of women on country radio. Her journalists talked to artists Brandi Carlile, Tanya Tucker, Mickey Guyton, and Margo Price, with Carlile posting the essential thought: “Ask yourself this question, what do you want your daughter to know about herself? And if you can’t get that from country music or you can’t get that from country radio, it’s a problem”.

The PRS Foundation announced an extension of its Keychange pledge, in which music festivals have committed to a 50/50 gender balance by 2022. More than 180 festivals across the world have signed up since last year, Guardian reports.

Three times as many male as female pop stars appeared on last year's biggest hit singles - ninety-one men or all-male groups were credited on the british Official Chart Company's top 100 most popular songs of 2018 - compared with 30 female acts. Thirteen of the most popular 100 songs of 2018 were credited only […]