Less than one per cent of the dance music played on UK radio is made by a female solo artist or all-female band, a new study suggests.
Women are also under-represented on the charts, accounting for just 5% of dance hits, according to the report, which examines gender imbalance in the scene.
To get heard, it says, Kacts have to collaborate with male producers.
Songs with women as the “featured” vocalist make up 44% of dance music on the radio and 37% of chart hits.
The pattern can be seen in the careers of musicians like Ella Henderson and Raye, whose collaborations with male producers like Jax Jones and Nathan Dawe often chart higher than their solo material.
‘The same old boys playing the same old line-ups’
The women behind the male DJs on the decks
The research, which covered the years 2020-2021, was conducted by the Jaguar Foundation – which is the brainchild of Radio 1 DJ Jaguar Bingham.
She says she was “disappointed and saddened” by the findings, which looked at female and non-binary representation across the club scene, from the board room to the charts.
Jaguar believes the lack of female dance producers is “systemic”, with many women discouraged from pursuing a career in music at an early age.
“If I think about when I was at school, boys were always encouraged to do more technical things like music production,” she says.
“As a result, there are more men in that field, so they managed to take over the scene and become the majority. So anyone who isn’t [a man] maybe feels shunned, doesn’t feel comfortable or doesn’t feel welcome.”
