Gender Inequality in Metal Music Production

Pauwke Berkers is Associate Professor of Sociology of Art and Culture, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He has published widely on issues of ethic/racial and gender inequality in arts and culture in, among others, Cultural Sociology, Gender and Society, Journal of Gender Studies, Metal Music Studies and Poetics. He is also a member of the International Society for Metal Music Studies.Julian Schaap is a PhD Candidate and Lecturer at the Department of Arts and Culture Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His research focuses on social stratification on the basis of whiteness, race-ethnicity and gender in various cultural fields. His work has been published in journals such as New Media and Society, Popular Communication, Sociologie and Metal Music Studies.

• Introduction: Gender Inequality in Metal Music Production 1. Winds of Change? Longitudinal trends and cross-national differences; (co-authored with Frank Weij) 2. 'Female-Fronted Metal': Gender Differences and (Sub)Genres 3. All Vocals, Few Chords: Gender Differences in Instrumentation 4. Wielding the Double-Edged Sword: Gender Differences in Artistic Careers Conclusion Appendix 1: Quantitative Data - The Metal ArchivesAppendix 2: Qualitative Data - Interviews with Metal Musicians

Drawing on the online Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archives, interviews, and online materials and interviews by others, the authors investigate how many women are involved in metal music production and the extent of gender inequality in the genre, looking at longitudinal trends and cross-national differences, subgenres within metal, roles in terms of instrumentation, and the degree of recognition between female and male musicians. They develop the concept of gender as a double-edged sword, in which women attract attention for their bands but are often evaluated based on their feminine appearance rather than musical skills, by linking it to theories of tokenism and cultural/structural embeddedness, and provide a theoretical overview to explain gender inequality in metal music production by examining the practices of learning, doing, and evaluating at the levels of society, pop music, and metal.