Where have country music's women gone?

The glass ceiling shattered in US politics last week with Hillary Clinton as the first woman nominated by a major party for president. So if the inevitable can happen in Washington, why does Nashville remain so backwards?

Research commissioned this year by Change the Conversation, an activist group for female artists in country music, found that starting in 2008, country music radio and the labels that service them have largely turned away from female performers at an alarming rate. Stanford University researcher Devarati Ghosh used Billboard’s Country Airplay chart to segment findings into three time clusters: 1992-1999, 2000-2007, and 2008-2015. Her findings showed the presence of women on the charts diminished over the years.

With the popularity of Faith Hill, Sara Evans, Shania Twain and others, the 1990s were the glory years for women in country music. Major labels brought 41 new solo female artists and 67 new male artists to radio. Despite lower numbers, women actually had more hits – 44% to 42% of men in the top 20. The early to mid-00s show a reversal: labels introduced 43 and 56 new female and male artists, respectively. Yet only 40% of those women had a top 20 single compared with 55% of men.

The most recent period, coinciding with the Obama presidency, has been even worse for women. At the height of “bro country”, labels introduced just 31 female artists compared with 51 new men. The result: 32% of women appeared in the top 20, compared with 57% of men.

While country radio has made room for fewer and fewer women, the data also shows that not one of the 10 women who had a top 20 hit ever landed a second one.

On her blog last month, Ghosh said: “The proportion of solo females being brought to country radio remained pretty steady over the three … blocks, but [their] success rate … has declined significantly.”

The data affirms what many female artists in Nashville have known for years. As “bro country” has dominated the charts in recent years with artists such as Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, women have largely been relegated to the sidelines. Indeed, according to industry publication Country Aircheck, only seven artists in the top 50 of those being spun this week on country radio are women.

What makes the situation frustrating is that there is no clear explanation for the imbalance. Radio gatekeepers often insist that audiences are simply less interested in hearing women singers, but their evidence is often anecdotal. The situation caught fire last year when radio consultant Keith Hill told Country Aircheck that stations should refrain from playing too many female artists, especially back-to-back.

“If you want to make ratings in country radio, take females out,” he said. “Trust me, I play great female records and we’ve got some right now; they’re just not the lettuce in our salad. The lettuce is Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are the females.”

Hill said his reasoning is based on “music tests from over the years” and responses from more than 300 of his client radio stations. His comments inadvertently caused a backlash from every pocket of the business – from managers to labels to artists. On Facebook, Miranda Lambert called Hill’s comments “the biggest bunch of bullshit I have ever heard” and vowed to vigorously “promote female singer-songwriters in country music – always”.

Beverly Keel, a former music executive in Nashville who now chairs the recording industry department at Middle Tennessee University in Murfreesboro, says that the collective shunning has had significant cultural implications over the years. “When country radio stopped playing so many women, the labels stopped signing as many women and publishers stopped hiring female songwriters,” she told the Guardian. “If country radio was playing women, the labels would sign them. It’s unbelievable this is happening in 2016.”

Singer Martina McBride echoed the sentiment to CBS News last year, calling the problem a “self-fulfilling prophecy”. “You have record companies that don’t invest in female artists or sign female artists as much, thinking they’re not going to get the return in investment or get played on the radio.”

Already, there are signs of the ripple effect. Pop stars such as Pink, Demi Lovato, Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry are being hired to perform at country music award shows or hired as duet partners with male country singers because there are so few country newcomers who are women. Other bona fide country stars, such as the Dixie Chicks and Taylor Swift, have broken ranks with the format and are now freely in pop territory, where the gender problem is not an issue. Fewer women on the country scene also means men dominate the conversation, which is why so much of country radio is ridden with songs about driving trucks or relationships from the male perspective. Different For Girls, one of the year’s few songs to look at a break-up from the woman’s side of things, was written by Dierks Bentley.

It certainly wasn’t always this way. Back in the 1930s, singer Patsy Montana broke down the gender wall with I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart, which was not only the first million-selling song written by a woman, it was also one of the first songs in country music to express a woman’s point of view. That song led to decades of strong female songwriters and stars – Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, Trisha Yearwood and many others – who all widened the doorway for women to claim space in whatever direction the music was traveling at the time. Yet these days, a song from a woman’s perspective – Loretta Lynn’s 1975 breakthrough single The Pill comes to mind – would probably never make it on country radio.

Naturally, this is a problem for new female songwriters fresh on the scene. Kalie Shorr, 22, moved to Nashville three years ago and says that she had many meetings along Music Row with labels that lauded her talents but told her: “We don’t have room for another female on the roster.” Back home, Shorr says she would pull up the same label’s website and see it had a handful of women but more than two dozen men. She says she believes labels are afraid to take chances with more women because of the perception that audiences are simply not interested. “Everyone is caught in a vicious cycle and afraid to go out on a limb,” she says.

Hill’s comments last year inspired her to collaborate with two other women – Hailey Steele and Lena Stone – and in January she released the result: Fight Like a Girl, a song that takes the controversy head-on: “I shine brightest when the goingʼs tough / You say I canʼt, well darling watch me,” she sings. The song, also a rarity because it was written entirely by women, is already an underground hit, earning a million Spotify streams and more than 350,000 views on YouTube. The song’s popularity is not from terrestrial radio, where she struggles to get on playlists, but from alternative outlets such as Radio Disney Country and Sirius XM. The song helped get her a booking agent but as for a major label, she says she still wants one to help her get to the next level. But now she is more cautious.

“Waiting for the right one is so important,” she says.

Despite the frustration, there is the sense that things are slowly changing despite those challenges. Margo Price, Maren Morris, Kacey Musgraves, Cam and others are millennial-aged newcomers who are defying the odds, both in what they are singing about and how they stand out. Change the Conversation is active in showcasing their challenges and is helping new singer-songwriters in town through mentorship programs and showcases.

“The problem of having so few females on country radio is fewer women can hear songs they can relate to and speak to their own lives. And what does that say to our daughters?” says Keel, a co-founder of Change.

Shorr says that women don’t necessarily want to write party anthems, which has become the staple for male artists on country radio. If women had more of a shot, the quality of the songs would finally deepen. “That’s what people love about women in country,” she says.