Ending Sexism in Music: A Conversation with Thea Wood

Sexism remains a pernicious issue in the music industry. Thea Wood is trying to fix that.

A few months ago, I worked on a massive project about how women remain massively underrepresented in the songwriting community. Additionally, men will rarely record songs exclusively written by women. This was a good wake up call for me that despite decades of progress, there is still a lot to be done related to gender equality in music.

Thea Wood has been working hard to make gender equality a reality. She is a Recording Academy member who runs Herizon Music, a newsletter and podcast “spotlighting women's contributions to modern music.” We spoke for an hour last week about the big wins for women in 2023, tangible things anybody can do to get rid of music industry sexism, her time bringing music online with AOL in the 1990s, and so much more.

A Conversation with Thea Wood

You founded and run Herizon Music, which is “on a mission to uplift the next gen of women in music through education, work experience, and role-modeling programs.” Can you tell me about some of the big wins for women in music recently?

I think 2023 was a banner year for women. Taylor Swift became a billionaire and had a whirlwind tour in the United States and beyond. Beyoncé was right there with her and also had record breaking ticket sales. SZA got nine Grammy nominations, which is unbelievable for a single female artist. Additionally, almost every nomination for Song, Album, and Record of the year went to women. That’s never happened before.

Herizon Music, Wood’s organization that supports women artists

Were there any wins for women not at the top of the pop world?

I hate to say it, but there's still a lot of struggle at lower levels for a few reasons. First, there's a lot of systemic gender bias in hiring. This leads to 80%-90% of bookings for local venues going to male or male-fronted acts. We need to get more women involved in booking. Live Nation also poses a problem because they get to choose who gets promotion. Much of that promotion goes to men. In fact, last week I got a promotional email from Live Nation that highlighted 20 artists. 19 were men. The one woman was Madonna.

It seems there are two approaches to improving opportunities for women in music. You have the top-down approach where more women winning awards and getting visibility leads to young women inspired to pursue music. You also have the bottom-up approach where you create direct opportunities for women at the beginning of their careers.

Exactly. There’s this term called “aesthetic force”, which describes how we can use art to change society's perceptions. I have kind of come up with an extension of that called “aesthetic force by omission”. When women are omitted from the conversation, promotions, top 10 lists, or whatever, they are getting a subliminal message that they don't belong. It’s important we understand the effect of that on a social and psychological level.

When you wrote about aesthetic force, you described how art can shift people’s perceptions beyond logic. One example you highlighted was Norman Rockwell’s “Rosie the Riveter” painting. Basically, that played a big role in making it acceptable for women to join the workforce in the United States in the 1940s. Are there other examples of aesthetic force that you think have impacted women in music?

I think MTV initially did a lot to help women in music reach new audiences. Women were putting out great music videos, and MTV was hungry for content. I think that's why we saw a lot of female voices in the 1980s. Today, that lives on with YouTube and Spotify’s recent visual approach. Of course, the flip side is those things can also be used to objectify women.

Image of Toni Basil, the singer behind the MTV-era hit “Mickey”

Let’s talk the flip side of aesthetic force. There have been studies done, for example, that show women are almost never played on country music radio. How can we neutralize aesthetic force by omission?

Part of that is just promoting women into decision making roles. Right now, female leadership is very low, which creates lots of issues. Recently, I had this artist Kalie Shorr on my podcast, and she told me how she had a meeting with a label. They told her that they loved her music, but they couldn’t sign her because there were too many women on their roster. In the room next door, a male artist was getting signed even though the majority of the people on the label are male. The crazy thing is that the label rep she was talking to was a woman.

One of the core values at Herizon is that collaboration beats competition. One woman succeeding should not mean that another can’t. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have done a really good job this year showing a united front and not allowing the media to pit them against one another for no reason. That's how we lift up the next generation.

A few years ago The Recording Academy started the Women in the Mix Pledge, where hundreds of prominent artists committed to working with women producers and engineers. A study by USC’s Annenberg Institute found that this pledge and similar pledges had little to no impact. What are tangible things you think that could be done to increase women’s inclusion throughout music?

Even though that pledge did not work out as planned, the Recording Academy has stood by their pledge to have more women as members and they have increased their membership to the point where I think they're now two-thirds of the way to their goal two years ahead of schedule. So, kudos to the Recording Academy for walking the walk on that one.

The biggest thing normal fans can do is go see live music at local clubs. That’s the number one way new artists put food on the table. We need to go out to the clubs. We need to buy merchandise. We need to buy music. It's so important to get the word out.

One recent issue with live music is that when people pay a pretty penny to go see megastars like Taylor Swift, they don’t have any money left to go to small, local shows.

I’ve been working with this startup called TelePresent Media, which is trying to spearhead a virtual reality live music club. Our goal is to book an equal number of men and women. VR will allow people to affordably experience live music from their homes. Some artists like Travis Scott and Ariana Grande are doing stuff like this for millions of dollars, but we want to make it accessible to small artists.

One of the through lines in your career is the intersection of music and technology. In the 1990s, you spent four years as Music Content Programmer for AOL. In effect, you played a large role in bringing music into the internet age. Tell me a bit about those years.

The first thing we did was create chats and message boards, so that people could feel connected to celebrities. In a way, it was like a pre-cursor to Instagram. Celebrities could post messages. Fans could respond. That sort of thing.

We did something where I was backstage with Oasis, and people could submit questions. I would pick some out for them. Then they would respond, and I would type the response. So, it was sort of real time. We also did content deals with record labels and print publications to get them to make early digital music content.

From AOL to this VR company, it seems like you think technology can democratize certain things about music. Is that accurate?