Are the Grammys Sexist?
Women dominated the 2024 Grammys. Is this a fluke or is it a sign of a more equitable future in music?
Over the weekend, I was putting together this month’s mailbag edition of the newsletter when I came across an interesting question:
The Grammys really pushed how it was the Year of The Woman as far as how many women were nominated for awards for 2024. How many actually WON awards last night (in all categories) vs. previous years and were there any categories with first-time female winners?
This question came from Thea Wood, the woman behind the newsletter Herizon Music, which spotlights “women's contributions to modern music.” As I dug into her inquiry, I realized that the answer was going to be much longer than the typical mailbag question. So, I decided to give it the full newsletter treatment. While I didn’t technically answer her question in full, I unearthed some pretty fascinating ways to quantify sexism at music’s biggest night.
Measuring Sexism at the Grammys
In 1957, Sadie Vimmerstedt had an idea for a song. Vimmerstedt was not a songwriter. She was a 52-year-old widow who worked selling beauty supplies. But that would not deter her. She decided she was going to send the concept for the song to Johnny Mercer. Mercer was not an easy person to reach, though.
By 1957, Johnny Mercer was already one of the most legendary songwriters of all-time, winning multiple Oscars for Best Original Song and penning such classics as “That Old Black Magic”, “Jeepers, Creepers!”, and “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)”. On top of that, he founded Capitol Records, one of the most successful labels at the time. None of this intimidated Vimmerstedt, though. She just penned a letter with her idea and addressed it to “Johnny Mercer, Songwriter, New York, NY.”
Rather than tossing it in the trash, someone at the post office decided to forward the letter to ASCAP, the performance rights organization that represented Mercer’s compositions. Someone in the ASCAP offices then gave the letter to Mercer. As reported in the March 12, 1963 edition of the Dayton Daily News, Mercer first responded to Vimmerstedt in 1959, two years after she’d initially written him. He apologized for his tardiness but told her that he would write the song.
Years went by before Vimmerstedt heard from Mercer again. When he reached out again, he told her that he wrote the song — now titled “I Wanna Be Around” — and was looking for someone to sing it. That someone ended up Tony Bennett. Bennett’s recording of “I Wanna Be Around” was a huge hit. Though she’d only supplied the germ of the idea, Mercer gave Vimmerstedt 50% of the writing credit. Since the song was subsequently recorded by Aretha Franklin, Bobby Darin, Patti Page, Perry Como, Brenda Lee, Eydie Gorme, and Frank Sinatra, Vimmerstedt never had to worry about money again.
“I Wanna Be Around” was later nominated for Song of the Year at the 1964 Grammy Awards. It lost to “Days of Wine and Roses”, another song co-written by the inimitable Mercer. Among many astounding facts about this story is that Sadie Vimmerstedt was only one of six women nominated for Song of the Year during the 1960s. This is a far cry from the 2020s when 34 of the 44 songs nominated for Song of the Year have had at least one woman credited as a songwriter. This made me wonder when things changed or if they changed at all. Were women still underrepresented at the Grammys?
To answer these questions, I focused on the four most prestigious awards handed out by The Recording Academy: Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist. All of these awards have been around effectively since the ceremony’s inception. Using these awards, we can try to see if there is evidence for sexism in both the nominating and winner-selection processes. Let’s start with the former.
I’ve elected to count women nominees in two ways. The more conservative approach — represented by the darker bar on the left — only counts a nomination if it involved no men. For example, when Alabama Shakes was nominated for Best New Artist in 2013, they were not counted by this methodology. Yes, the group is fronted by a woman, namely Brittany Howard, but the other members are men. By contrast, my more inclusive approach — represented by the lighter bar on the right — did count the Alabama Shakes. This approach counts a nomination if at least one woman was involved.
What we see is that from the 1960s through the 1980s, women were severely underrepresented in the Grammy nomination process for the four most prestigious awards. By the 1990s, things started to improve such that nominations were getting closer to 50% men and 50% women. To be clear, a single year with few women nominated is not strong evidence for underlying sexism in the nominating procedures. But over a longer period, we would expect nominations between men and women to be pretty much equal. As time has gone on, that is actually what we’ve seen.
There is a similar pattern when looking at the winners of the big awards. Though women rarely won in the 1960s, it is extremely common for them to take home a trophy these days. That said, as I was looking through this data, I realized that just looking at the percentage of women who won wasn’t ideal. Let’s take the 1983 nominees for Record of the Year to understand why.
“Always on My Mind” by Willie Nelson
“Chariots of Fire” by Vangelis
“Ebony & Ivory” by Stevie Wonder & Paul McCartney
“Steppin' Out” by Joe Jackson
“Rosanna” by Toto
When The Recorded Academy handed the gramophone trophy to Toto for their groovy recording of “Rosanna”, you couldn’t get mad about sexism in the winner selection process. There were no women nominated! As a voter, you had no choice but to vote for a man. In other words, the issue in this case isn’t tied to how winners are selected but how nominees are selected. We need to disentangle these two processes.
To do that, we are going to compare the percentage of women nominated across the major awards to the percentage of women who won. Let me explain why with another example. Across the decades, there have been 20 times where a single all-male act was nominated in a major award category. For example, here are the Best New Artist nominees in 1996.
Brandy
Alanis Morissette
Joan Osborne
Shania Twain
Hootie & the Blowfish
Despite Hootie and his backing band being the only men nominated, they took home the trophy that year. That doesn’t necessarily indicate sexism in the winner selection process. But if men consistently won awards where the odds were stacked again them, something fishy might be going on. That’s not the case, though.
Across those 20 awards where a woman was involved in four of five nominations, the all-male nominees took home the trophy 30% of the time. If we assumed that each nominee had an equal chance of winning, then we’d expect that percentage to be closer to 20%. Nevertheless, it’s not like men are winning 90% of the time when we would expect them to win 20% of the time.
To do this at scale, I took the percentage of women who won within each decade and subtracted off the percentage of women nominated. In a perfect world, we would expect this difference to result in 0%. If the difference is negative, it means that men are over-indexing (e.g., 10% of nominees were men but they won 90% of awards). If the difference is positive, it means that women are over-indexing (e.g., 35% of nominees were women but they won 60% of awards). Here’s what we see when looking at the actual data:
In the 1960s, men consistently won more awards than we’d expect given the nominations. This could indicate sexism among those that selected the winners.
In the 1980s, 2000s, and 2010s, the results are almost perfect. For example, in the 2010s, 28.3% of nominees were only women and 50.0% of nominees had at least one woman. Within that same decade, 27.5% of winners were only women and 50.0% of winners had at least one woman.
In the 1970s, 1990s, and 2020s, women won more awards than we’d expect given the nominations they’d received. In fact, when we look across all the decades, women have beaten expectations.
Together this suggests more evidence for sexism in the Grammy nominating process than the winner selection process. If women are nominated, voters don’t seem to have a problem giving them a trophy. The historical issue has been that not enough women are nominated.
It would be remiss not to mention that sexism can’t always be quantified. Along with diving into the data, it’s also important to listen to the stories that women are telling. It’s important to note when someone as powerful as Neil Portnow — the former president of The Recording Academy — says that women needed to “step up” after a dearth of wins during the 2018 Grammy telecast. An attitude like that can be an issue even if doesn’t appear in the data. Nevertheless, this data gives me hope for a more equitable future in music. It gives me hope that a woman can be celebrated for composing a song on her own rather than having to reach out to one of the most powerful songwriters alive to get it made, just like Sadie Vimmerstedt did all those years ago.
A New One
"La Intención" by Christian Nodal & Peso Pluma
2024 - Corridos Tumbados
One thing that has shockingly not come up in this newsletter is the dramatic crossover popularity of various forms of Mexican folk music in the last few years. “La Intención” is the latest song from Christian Nodal and Peso Pluma, two of the biggest Mexican stars right now.
If you’ve never heard any of the subgenres that fall under the very broad “Regional Mexican” or “Música Mexicana” categorizations — stuff like norteño and mariachi and banda — you will be shocked. Your shock will have nothing to do with the quality of the music. Your shock will be driven by how distinct the music is from most other styles popular among young people today. Over the next few years, I suspect these styles will makes a splash in some of the more prestigious Grammy categories.
An Old One
"The Best Is Yet to Come" by Nancy Wilson
1963 - Big Band
The first female songwriter to ever be nominated for Song of the Year was Carolyn Leigh. In 1959, Leigh and Cy Coleman received a nomination for composing “Witchcraft”, first made famous by Frank Sinatra. At that time, when a woman had a career as a songwriter, she was almost always a lyricist. Leigh was indeed a lyricist. And she was a very good one. My favorite of Leigh’s lyrics are heard from “The Best Is Yet to Come”. Though it has been recorded scores of times, I think the most underrated rendition is by Nancy Wilson. There is just something intoxicating about her vocal on this recording.
Special shoutout to Brittany Newberry at Georgia State University for providing me with photos of and correspondence between Johnny Mercer and Sadie Vimmerstedt, which are stored in their Johnny Mercer Archive.
Want to hear the music that I make? Check out my latest single “Move On Up” wherever you listen to music.
Thank you! This is insightful and thought provoking! The USC studies in conjunction with the academy showed that historically, one woman was nominated for every nine men who were nominated for a GRAMMY — I think it was from 2013-2018– across all categories. Not sure what their methodology was.
But it lends to your last comment about women getting nominated being an obstacle. Anyhoo, thanks again for the deep dive. Sharing!!!
Yes, I think you’ve gone at this the right way, looking at wins. If we look at nominations, a statistician would immediately begin asking questions about the underlying pool of eligible songwriters and musicians. For example, if one of those populations skews male, say, in the 60s, then we would probably expect more nominations of men, right? And that would be an industry question, not a Grammy question.
That’s my logical take. My unlogical take includes questions about the larger meaning of the Grammys and the many anomalies. For example, Bob Dylan didn’t win his first solo Grammy until 1980. This is the guy the Beatles referred to as The Man, who has 8 albums and songs from the 60s and 70s that are in the Grammy Hall of Fame. He didn’t win a Grammy for any of those?
And was the P.O. awesome in 1957 or what? Who sends a letter to somebody in NYC without a street address?