Men Almost Never Perform Songs Written by Women

With The Pudding, I catalogued the history of gender representation among songwriters. The results are depressing.

Between 2018 and 2022, I listened to every Billboard Hot 100 number one hit. One song per day. I talk about this frequently. Part of the reason is because I learned a great deal about myself and music along the way. But an even bigger part is because that project is the reason that I started collecting data about music.

It started small. At first, I would just log a rating and description of each song. Over time, I collected more and more information. Producers. Labels. Song length. If the song appeared in a film. The list goes on.

One day, I was filtering the data based on songwriter gender and realized that most number ones were written exclusively by men. In fact, between 1958 and 2020, only 25% had at least one songwriter who was a woman. In that same period, only 3% were written exclusively by women. I was shocked.

I mentioned this to the folks at The Pudding, maybe the web’s most incredible publication. With their help, we expanded my dataset to include all top 5 hits between 1958 and 2022. That’s 3077 songs written by 4074 songwriters. Today, I’m going to talk about some of our insights, but I implore you to check out the entire piece on The Pudding as it is highly visual and interactive.

We Need More Songs Written by Women

Helen Reddington was surprised when Elton John announced his marriage to Renate Blauel. No, Reddington’s shock wasn’t driven by the fact that the piano man’s sexuality was frequently tabloid fodder. She was shocked that Elton’s future wife was a sound engineer prominent enough to work on his 1984 album Breaking Hearts. Reddington recounts this in her book She’s at the Controls: Sound Engineering, Production and Gender Ventriloquism in the 21st Century: “What surprised me, however, was that such a thing as a female sound engineer existed, and that she [Blauel] was respected enough to work at such a high level in the music industry.”

Reddington, who would go on to be a lecturer in the University of East London’s Department of Music, was right to be surprised. At one time or another, women have been excluded from nearly every role in the music industry. Though they have made strides in many areas - since 2000, 45% of artists on top 5 hits were composed of at least one woman - they have been woefully left behind in others. For example, since 1958, there have never been more than 15% of top 5 hits written by women within a given year.

I would be remiss to note that the number of songs with at least one songwriter who is a woman has risen dramatically over the decades. In the 1960s, only 13% of top 5 hits had at least one songwriter who was a woman. In the 2010s, that number had risen to 50%. That increase is deceptive for three reasons. Primarily, the number of songwriters on hit songs has risen sharply.

No, this isn’t because songwriters are less talented. It comes down to sampling, lawsuits, a changing definition of songwriting, and a few other factors. An in depth discussion falls outside the scope of this essay, but I wrote about it here if you’re curious. Nevertheless, the number of women songwriters has risen proportionally with the total number of songwriters. In other words, the growth in women who are songwriters has been drowned out by the growth in men who are songwriters.

Secondly, when women get a songwriting credit on a song, they are usually outnumbered by men. More specifically, in the 2010s, only 2% of top 5 hits had a majority of women writers. 90% had a of majority men.

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Thirdly, when women do write hit songs, they are almost always performed by at least one woman and often at least one of those performers is also the writer. To again get more specific, Taylor Swift has performed 24 top 5 hits through 2022. Each of the songs had at least one songwriter who is a woman. In each case but 4, Swift is the sole woman.

As you go down this rabbit hole, you’ll find that men or groups of men almost never perform songs exclusively written by women. In fact, from 1958 through 2022, there have only been 13 top 5 hits written exclusively by women and performed exclusively by men. In 30% of those cases, the songwriter was one person: Diane Warren. (See example below). By contrast, there have been 255 top 5 hits written exclusively by men and performed exclusively by women.

Women writing so few hits without men does not come down to lack of skill. It almost always comes down to men preventing women from participating in the songwriting process, sometimes via physical or sexual violence. This is a dark, depressing history that we capture in a bit more detail in our original piece.

There is of course work being done to improve this situation. USC’s Annenberg Institute and the nonprofit We Are Moving the Needle are spearheading initiatives to bring women into more roles in the music industry. But there is still a long way to go.

I have only included a snippet of the information that I covered in my full project with The Pudding. I implore you to check out the entire piece to get a better understanding for how gender inclusion has involved in the hit songwriting community.

A New One
"Somebody Love Me" by Joy Oladokun
2023 - Singer-Songwriter

I could do a better job featuring more women in this newsletter. So far, only 25% of new songs have been by artists who are women. I’m sure the songwriter numbers are even worse. And that’s a shame. There are more women writing and performing music than ever before. One of the most talented is Joy Oladokun.

Since her first EP was self-released seven years ago, Oladokun has come a long way. Her most recent album features collaborations with Chris Stapleton, Maxo Kream, and Mt. Joy. Whether she is singing by herself or with a seasoned performer, the thing that overwhelms Oladokun’s music is both empathy and joy. A song like “Somebody Like Me” makes you feel like even in the depths of despair that things will be alright.

An Old One
"And When I Die" by Blood, Sweat & Tears
1969 - Jazz Rock

Beyond the aforementioned Diane Warren, the only other woman to write multiple top 5 hits for groups with at least one male member is Laura Nyro. Though she is lionized in songwriting circles and wrote a few hits for other artists, Nyro never achieved mass commercial success as a performer.

In 2021, the Guardian noted that Nyro’s songwriting pushed “the boundaries of popular music by writing songs celebrating motherhood, female sexuality and her menstrual cycle”. Though “And When I Die” does not cover one of those topics, its themes are unexpected. The song opens with a couplet that is shocking for a pop song: “I'm not scared of dying / And I don't really care”. That shock is further compounded by the horn-infused rock of Blood, Sweat & Tears, a group that can take you on an unexpected musical journey even when the lyrics they are singing aren’t so radical.

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