Study: Men Almost Never Sing Songwritten by Women

As a male singer&#x2F;songwriter I can tell you that women songwriters tend to, for unknown reasons, write their songs around female vocal capabilities, which are objectively higher than men&#x27;s in terms of range and fluidity.<p>Women cover male songwriters frequently, but who are the great female songwriters? Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Kate Bush, and so on. They all tend to be excellent vocalists who write stuff that the average man simply can&#x27;t match. While the great male songwriters are often weak to average singers: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Lennon&#x2F;McCartney. Women kill on those songs, with barely an effort sometimes.<p>As for modern Top40. It sucks. Who cares?

Sorry if this is insensitive but; what are &quot;we&quot; supposed to do to have more women write songs? People are so quick to point out male dominated professions, but what exactly is the purpose of pointing it out - what does the author intend to accomplish?

Okay.. honest question without negative intent: Why should we care? Stats are cool and all, but what am I supposed to do with this information?

Goddamn, this is one of the most aggravating sites I have ever seen. I would rather 1995 flashy shit than this.

The presentation of the data doesn&#x27;t support the conclusions drawn, i.e. women have been actively impeded in songwriting - they might have been, but the data doesn&#x27;t say that on its own.<p>Also, some credits were only there due to sampling, the songwriters did not actively sit down and write or co-write that particular song.<p>Given that music has been almost completely democratised with the lowest barrier to entry there has ever been, it&#x27;s hard to say women are being prevented from songwriting, but breaking into the highest echelons of the hit industry (a dubious accolade) might be tougher. We don&#x27;t know how many are trying.

I have another angle: I spent some years of my youth singing in a choir and one of the biggest challenges there was to bring more male voices into the group.<p>Apparently singing was considered girly or something. Writing wasn&#x27;t though, because you&#x27;d have teenage boys write rap songs - I avoided a lot of bullying by producing work impressive enough to gain some respect among the school thugs - even though it was essentially a diss on the whole culture.<p>Anyway I landed in a choir only because I was shanghaied into it by my (female) friend. Was a nice change of pace, but the male&#x2F;female ratio was only slightly different compared to my previous activity - theatre.<p>What I&#x27;m getting at is that not everything has to be intersectional.

Considering this is just data, ala lacks any analysis or opinions on why this is the case as well as any actionable insights to improve the situation, I want to just focus on the presentation of the data.<p>The presentation is designed beautifully, and executed well. I personally despise custom scrolling mechanics that make it near impossible to revisit earlier information cogently, but I can appreciate the aesthetics of the thing.<p>I feel these sorts of set ups are designed and developed because the people building them already know all of the pertinent information they contain, and so see this as a great, or at least interesting, way to view the data, but I feel that this sort of medium is incomprehensible for someone who is clicking this without previous knowledge of the dataset.<p>Due to the headline I was intrigued to know just what popular songs were written exclusively by women and what the ratio was for some of my own favourite popular songs was, but I had to wade through a sea of smooth animations to finally be unable to interact with the information I wanted.<p>Sure lists and spreadsheets are boring to some, but in my opinion they are far more effective at getting your data across.<p>If you&#x27;re a designer, please just design a more beautiful experience of &#x2F;exploring&#x2F; the dataset rather than a more beautiful &#x2F;presentation&#x2F; of the dataset.

Interesting link, although not sure why it doesn&#x27;t have the original title (&quot;Women are superstars on stage, but rarely get to write songs&quot;). The original title better represents the link than what was provided.

It&#x27;s worth scrolling through. Stats that are so rare that they give food for thought, on two topics we deal with everyday (music and gender).<p>Plus it&#x27;s nicely made.

It&#x27;d be interesting (but probably challenging, in terms of data quality) to see this extended beyond top hits. It&#x27;s unfortunately not surprising that men dominate the world of professional hit songwriting; it would be interesting to see if that extends to independent songwriting and producing.

I feel that this article convincingly makes the case that women are vastly underrepresented in songwriting of top hits.<p>That said, I feel like I have little to no insight into how songwriting works as an industry. Who chooses songwriters for a headline act? How much say do the performers have? What ostensibly motivates the choices of whoever chooses?<p>The conclusion implicit throughout the article (made explicit at the end) is that this data is the result of bias, and I suspect that&#x27;s probably right. But I&#x27;d love to hear more about where and how that actually happens.

Do they break out songs written by and sung by? Do a song written by a woman but sung by a man and vice versa, do they make a difference or does the actual voice of men and women come through in the writing that who does the singing makes little difference?

This is not a study.

Fascinating, specially because I just found out that I’m not amongst the majority in this respect.