How inequality is edging women out of the Australian music industry

But instead of jumping around to empowering feminist lyrics, I'm staring at the back of a guy's head, while he jumps around, seemingly ignorant to the many women stuck behind him who can't even glimpse the band. And he's not the only one – there are guys dancing at the very front, knocking into the women on either side of them, completely unaware of their impact. There are guys ripping off their own shirts when the band commands the audience to in one of their songs, not realising that the whole point of the song (to my mind at least) is for women to take off their shirts in an act of defiance towards the body policing that defines our public lives.

To be fair, there are also a number of male Glitoris fans standing patiently at the back of the crowd, letting women ahead of them, and acknowledging the truth of this particular space – as a space specifically made to explore female empowerment through music.

But the enthusiastic men in front of and around me are killing my vibe – and they don't seem to get why.

Here's the reality of the Australian music industry – men are nudging women out everywhere. Those men at Glitoris were nudging me and my friends out of the audience, and men are nudging women musicians off stages, line-ups, award shortlists and radio playlists across the country.

A study undertaken by Triple J's Hack program for this year's International Women's Day in March paints a clear picture of the gender inequality that seeps through our music industry. Only 1 in 5 artists registered with the Australian Performing Rights Association is a woman – meaning women are less likely to get paid royalties for their work when it is used commercially. Worse, only 1 in 3 nominations for ARIA awards in 2015 were for a solo female musician, or a band with at least one woman in it.

And Triple J readily admits that this is an issue that affects the airwaves too – in their playlist between 1-7 February this year, 61% of the music was made by all male bands or solo male artists. Only 16% were all female musicians.

This larger picture of inequality is seen in our own, smaller music scene in Canberra. In an article published on Feminartsy, the online feminist journal I run, musician Sophie Chapman looks at the lack of women in music in the ACT.

She ran a qualitative and quantitative study on women musicians in Canberra and found that of the bands creating and playing original music in our city, only 16.6 percent of the musicians are women.

It's 2016. This is Australia. What excuse do we have for this rampant gender inequality?

The common arguments are the same that are used for gender inequality across all industries – maybe men just make better music than women. Or women don't try hard enough. Or, frankly, if the public just prefer male performers to female performers, why shouldn't we give the people what they want?

Except all of those arguments assume that decisions around what we play on the radio, or who we program onto a stage occur in a vacuum, untouched by the broader culture of inequality that influences who among us gets to learn an instrument, or is nurtured to have the self-confidence to play on a stage, or is framed as a 'musician' making music for all audiences, rather than as a 'female musician', serving only a presumed female audience.

The music we value is filtered through all of these lenses – it is shaped by our own attitudes towards where we think a woman's place is, on a stage or in our homes, raising babies or making albums.

It is affected by what we see as serious, important music (Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Prince) and what we think is interesting, but not necessarily groundbreaking (Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Patti Smith).

Of course, it gets even worse when we look at other diversity factors, like race, sexuality, or (dis)ability.

This is not to say that male musicians aren't excellent – of course they are. Of course Dylan and Bowie and Prince had a huge influence on our shared musical history. It's just a shame that their impact on the canon seems to somehow swamp the equal impact of female musicians who pushed boundaries, who created new sounds, and who were just as talented (and in some cases more so) than their male counterparts.

Art is not often interrogated as a site of entrenching inequality in our community. In fact, the impact of the arts, both positive and negative, are often ignored across the board (if the continuous attacks to arts funding are anything to go by).

But the truth is that music, and literature and art are all influenced by and have an influencing factor on the broader culture of our communities. And what we see on a festival stage can be reflected in what we see in our board rooms, or our Parliament, or other sites of influence.

The solution to gender inequality in music is not a simple one – but beginning by empowering young women to explore music, and to actively pursue opportunities to perform and to be heard is one step in the right direction.

Simultaneously, the men who pull the strings in the industry – and it is mostly men in leadership positions in music, according to Triple J – need to take an active part in supporting female musicians, programming more women onto line-ups, and nominating female artists for awards at the same rates as male musicians.

Without a whole of community approach, music lovers like myself might be destined to many more evenings of staring at the back of a well-intentioned, but largely thoughtless man's head at music venues around the country.