‘The man that got away’: Gender inequalities in the consumption and production of jazz

Abstract

Jazz is remarkable among genres in emerging from marginalised communities to a position of status, and is also evidently male-dominated in terms of both audiences and musicians. Using the Taking Part surveys of cultural participation in England, we investigate the gender gap in jazz and how it compares with classical and rock. We find women are less likely to attend jazz concerts than men. We also report on a unique dataset of 983 musicians, and identify how the position of women in the jazz network differs from men. Women also feature lower recording productivity, an effect appearing to work directly rather than mediated by instrumental choice or period of birth. We argue that equality of access to cultural advantage requires that we attend to how gender inequalities operate within genres, both to inform measures for debiasing and also to uncover mechanisms of gender inequalities which may hold in other contexts.