The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released its sixth annual survey of the Billboard Hot 100 charts Tuesday and found progress in several areas on gender and POC diversity.
The study found that in 2022, 30% of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Chart were women, which was an improvement over 2021’s 23.3% — and the first year-over-year increase recorded in the study. Across an 11-year span, the overall percentage of female artists was 22.3%.
“There is good news for women artists this year,” Dr. Stacy L. Smith, founder and director of the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, said. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves—there is still much work to be done before we can say that women have equal opportunity in the music industry.”
While the share of music artists from underrepresented ethnic groups on the year-end list decreased from the 57% seen in 2021, the share of POC musicians still remained at around 50%. Among those underrepresented artists, 65% were women, an increase from 55% in 2021.
On the other hand, the list of songwriters and producers on the Billboard Hot 100 remains almost exclusively white and male. USC Annenberg found that only 14% of songwriters on the year-end chart were women, similar to in 2021. Over the past 11 years, only 12.8% of songwriters on the list have been women.
When analyzing how many songs on the year-end chart have women credited as songwriters, the results are just as poor. More than half of the songs across 11 years did not credit a woman songwriter, while 43% had one or more women songwriters. In contrast, less than 1% of all songs were missing male songwriters.
The share of women who are producers is even worse, with just 3.4% of producers in 2022’s year-end list being female. Across all 1,700 songs surveyed beyond 2022, just 5.2% had a female producer credited.
Smith also called out the Recording Academy’s Women in the Mix pledge, an initiative asking artists to pledge to hire women as producers and engineers, as very ineffective. When surveying artists who made the pledge to see if they fulfilled their promise and throwing out songs in which the artists themselves were producer or engineer, only one artist on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2022 stuck to the pledge.
That artist was Nicki Minaj, whose song “Super Freaky Girl” was produced by Malibu Babie. The song debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart, making Malibu Babie the first and only female producer this century to achieve such a debut.
Also included in the report is an analysis of Grammy nominations across five top categories, with
the addition of the Songwriter of the Year category in 2023. In 2023, 15.2% of nominees across these six major categories were women, barely improving from the 14.1% last year.
The Best New Artist category had 50/50 gender parity among the nominees while Songwriter of the Year was 60% female, but only 15% of the Record of the Year nominees and 12% of the Album of the Year nominees were women. Across the 11 years evaluated, 13.9% of nominees in the major categories were women while 86% were men.
The full report from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative can be read here.
