Despite our so-called "best" efforts, gender parity and equity continue to be things that inevitably elude us in a patriarchal society. A new study on Canadian commercial radio airplay has revealed that music by women is still vastly underrepresented on the airwaves, the Canadian Press reports.
Looking at the top 150 songs across the 10-year period from 2013 to 2023 on popular radio formats including Top 40, country, and rock stations, musicologist Jada Watson found that, across the board, songs by women — especially women of colour — were played far less often than songs by their male counterparts.
Rock stations were the worst offenders, giving songs by women an average of only 1.9 percent of airtime in 2012. Meanwhile, in the likewise notoriously white male-dominated genre of country music, radio stations saw music by women played only 12.9 percent of the time, at a rate of two songs per hour of programming.
As part of her SongData research program, Watson conducted the study in partnership with Women in Music Canada and Ottawa's National Arts Centre. You can check out the full study, entitled Share the Air, here; it's important work that I'm glad to see happening.