Music and Gender

I have been racking my brain trying to think what experiences I have had that have showed gender differences in my musical encounters, and I was having a really hard time thinking of where I had seen an imbalance of gender in music.  I think I have pretty much come to the consensus that all of the orchestra's that I have played in have been pretty much equal in gender.  There are a few instruments that I can think of where there is a tendency of one gender or the other to play them.  One of them happens to be the harp.  I can only think of one guy that has played a harp in an orchestra with me.  I think the flute and maybe the violin is another example of an instrument that tends to draw in more girls than guys.  One instrument that is the opposite is the upright bass which seems to attract more guys than gals.  I think that there is one difference between this generation and maybe some of the earlier ones.  Whereas before, it might be weird or improper for a person of a certain gender to play one instrument or another, I believe now, that if there is an instrument that tends to attract a specific gender and someone of the opposite gender plays it, it is not really thought of as improper.  I feel like this is on a younger level though.  It seems like when you start to become competitve in the classical music world, things start to balance out.  As a whole, I feel like the orchestra is pretty balanced with men vs. women.


Another example that I can think of in the music world is conductors.  I have actually had more women conductors than I have men, but I believe that this is a fairly new thing.  Most professional orchestra concerts that I have been to, and YouTube videos that I have watched of professional orchestras, have a man as a conductor.  I followed around a conductor for a month as my senior project in high school and her name was Dr. Erin Freeman.  She conducted my youth orchestra as well as a few other good groups.  She had mentioned how it was just now that women were starting to be accepted as conductors and that she still had trouble sometimes being a woman in that field.  She said that there are things that some people don't think of when it comes to being a women conductor, such as what a women conductor should wear that is appropriate. 


One last topic I wanted to touch on was cello and gender.  I was looking up if there was some kind of count of female cllists to male cellists and this is what I found http://www.imerc.org/research_gender.php.  It seems that when it comes to recordings of classical musicians, there seems to be more male recordings then female, in particular, the Bach cello suites.  There are 55 recordings by men, and 5 by women.  I found this interesting because I feel like things are balanced when it comes to gender in the professional classical music world, but I'm not sure anymore.  I do feel like it might be changing from being more men to being balanced.