The world of popular music is highly structured in terms of gender. Tradition-
ally, women have been positioned as consumers and fans, and in supportive roles
(wife, mother, girlfriend) rather than as active producers of music: musicians.
When they have been on stage, on TV, on record, it has nearly always been as
singers. They have sometimes written their own lyrics, rarely their own music,
and there are very few women playing instruments. Currently, women's lives
are accompanied by a male soundtrack. This has important implications, for
popular music permeates modern life and helps to make us the people we
are, both reflecting existing gender differences and also actively helping to con-
struct them. Young women and men learn how to be feminine, masculine, and
heterosexual through listening to rock ¹ music, and observing the clothes, bodily
gestures, and general performance of rock musicians as they simultaneously
perform gender, sexuality, and music.

All human beings are musical, capable of both appreciating and making
music. Because girls are as musical as boys, and women as musical as men, you
would expect women to comprise roughly half of the jazz or blues players in the
local pub, 50 per cent of instrumentalists on TV, half of all club DJs, and half of
the people on stage at music festivals, which is patently not the case and never
has been. There have, of course, always been exceptions and these have become
more frequent over the last two decades, but the pattern is only slowly beginning
to change. I approach music as a music fan, a musician, a feminist, and a soci-
ologist. It is in the latter role that I ask the obvious question: why is there such an
imbalance between men and women's involvement? However, before moving on
to explanations, it is necessary to paint as clear and broad a picture as possible of
the gendered nature of modern popular music-making.

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