Q’s With USC’s Dr. Stacy L. Smith On ‘Inclusion in the Recording Studio?’

Coinciding with International Women’s Day, the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released the fourth annual edition of the “Inclusion in the Recording Studio?” report on March 8, assessing gender and race/ethnicity for artists, songwriters and producers appearing on Billboard’s Hot 100 Year-End Chart, as well as Grammy nominations in five popular categories.

The report conducted by Dr. Stacy L. Smith and the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, with funding from Spotify, found that women only represented 20.2% of all artists on Billboard’s Hot 100 Year-End Charts in 2020 and 21.6% of all artists on the year-end charts from 2012 to 2020. 

Pollstar reached out to Dr. Smith to learn more about the data and what it means for the music industry and our culture. Dr. Smith is an associate professor of communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and she is the founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the leading think tank in the world studying diversity and inclusion in entertainment through original research and sponsored projects. She appeared at the 2019 Pollstar Live! conference as one of the speakers on the panel “Diversity & Inclusion: What Inclusion Riders Mean for the Touring Community.”

Dr. Stacy L. Smith: I would guess that you’re probably accurate in your assessment that this is one of the blind spots because what typically happens in the work by other scholars, on the availability currency, if you can think of a few salient examples of a class of event, if they come to mind easily or quickly, you’ll overestimate the frequency of that. And is if somebody is having a conversation and they think of women artists, and they think of Billie Eilish or Rihanna or Nicki Minaj or Adele, they’re going to likely overestimate how well women are doing in music. And that’s why this data is actually really important because it can counter those kinds of quick shortcuts or biases that we have cognitively with actual data to suggest that no – women are roughly a fifth (last year) of the performers on the chart. And it’s really not too terribly different than 2014.  

Well, I think that there’s really no meaningful difference from 2019 or 2018, right? We define a meaningful difference at 5 percentage points greater or lesser than a statistic. And so, what we’re seeing here is that the last three years really represent no meaningful change. What’s interesting is to look back and say, well, what was going on in ‘14, ‘15 and ‘16 when there was a natural uptick and a notable jump if we’re just looking at women on the chart? We have seen over the last few years the uptick in the percentage of underrepresented racial or ethnic performers over the last few years. And so, while we’ve seen these trends, they’re not bearing out in the data over the last few years in music. They represent essentially no change. And there’s a real danger in this because you want women to come into the industry, those that are talented, and you want them to understand that there’s access and opportunity with that talent and what the data signals to aspiring artists is that the playing field is, in fact, not level.   

Data like this can often serve to discourage women … that only 20% of the spots are driven by women on the chart. That means 80% are going to men. And so I think a double-edged sword here is not only is it a barometer of how women are doing present day in kind of the most high-profile arena on this chart, but it also signals that they’re welcome to only a fifth of the spots. That could really have a pronounced negative impact on women choosing this as a viable option in terms of wanting to express their talent. It lets them know that very few make it.   

One of the things that we’re trying to do is to not look too far back because what we don’t want to do is to compare 2020 to let’s say 1970 or 1980 because that’s the wrong comparison. In looking back, you can say, well, women have come this far, or we haven’t made much progress. What you want to do is force the comparison between men and women present day. Because as soon as you look back, you’re using a metric of where were women at point A and where were women at point B. What we want to do is say where are women relative to men because I don’t think anyone would make the case that 80% of the talent goes to men and only 20% goes to women. We’re a bit wary of too much over-time work, because we want to make sure that people are comparing how this distribution is not 50/50, which is what you would expect. 

Well, I think the songwriting area is really problematic because the lyricist is setting the cultural agenda. And these songs are not just distributed here, but globally. There’s a statistic in the report that illuminate just how problematic these charts are in terms of work. There are a handful of men that are songwriters that are controlling a large percentage of the work product of the songs on the Billboard charts. (The top 11 men songwriters were responsible for writing 22.5% of the songs in the 900-song sample over nine years.)

So, we’re talking about 11 men culturally setting the agenda for what is communicated in some of the most popular content that audiences consume in the form of these songs, these short little stories and it is not too terribly hard to make the leap to what impact this might have on young people when they’re only hearing a very narrow perspective.

Exactly. And so, it’s just interesting that there’s a small cohort of men that are getting so much work and how many songs erase women altogether as songwriters. There are nonprofits like She Is The Music that are working tirelessly to put women in songwriting camps and enable them to be mentored by women in the business and creating an infrastructure like a database to identify female identified songwriters. So, we know that work is being done to provide access and opportunity, but when it comes to who’s working with who and in terms of songwriters and we see just because based on this data that 57% of 900 songs don’t feature a single woman songwriter. Culturally, that is going to have a pronounced effect. 

All of our other work in film and series and television content illuminates that when women write, when women produce, when women direct, it changes what we see on screen. And so, what we’re feeding young people is a very lopsided view about what it means to be a woman in today’s world.  Less than 1% have only women writers and so there’s a real question [for] women artists – how did they get attached to songwriters? How do they get attached to producers? Do they value letting other women into the process? Do they want to work with women? I think these are all really important questions because it’s important to advocate for other women. It’s also important to say that this ecosystem reveals that the playing field is not level and so the structure in the way in which business is done has to change because these numbers suggest that women are being shut out from many of these categories. I mean, when you’re at 2% of producers and 3% of engineers, it’s really clear that the ability to have access is not lifted up equally across the individual. It is based on identity and that is discriminatory. 

Well, I think that we need to move beyond performative pledges and actually do the hard work of diversity and inclusion. When you look at data like this, it’s really clear that there is a conceptual problem.   

There’s probably mythologizing and a nomenclature that systematically excludes women and people of color from decision-making feats, from having the power positions that can create change to artists, who they choose to work with or who they’re told they should work with, to the team that surrounds them. … The hard work is doing an audit. And when you’re working with talent, do you represent lists of songwriters that have males and females on them? Do you only have certain people that you go to for artists to work with? How do you bring in new talent? How do you give them the same types of experiences so that they can hone their craft in the same way that their male peers are getting experience and all of the work that has to be done? 

It just doesn’t happen with a fleeting pledge. There’s typically a formula. You have to do an internal audit. You have to be transparent with the results of that audit. You need to think critically about how you account for the biases that are in place and how you set goals or targets of what you want to achieve over time and be transparent externally with whether you hit those targets. And keep that level of engagement, because without that, we won’t see change.