labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet / décembre 2010 - julho/dezembro 2010

Professional music in light of gender:

toward a sociological understanding

Marie Buscatto

Translated by Amy Jacobs

Abstract

The emergence of professional women musicians, free to create and practice their art autonomously, is a recent phenomenon that runs parallel to the twentieth-century female professional liberation movement in western worlds. But while women have had access to the professional practice of music, they still encounter many obstacles that differentiate female musicians' destinies from male musicians' trajectories. This article aims to bring to light the social processes that both nderlie women's access to professional music in western countries at the dawn of the twenty-first century and explain the difficulties they encounter—greater than those facing their male colleagues—getting into those social worlds, staying in them and gaining recognition in them.

Key-words:women musicians, obstacles , professional music

Traditionally, the practice of music has dovetailed well with being female. Historical studies and ethnological surveys note the recurring presence of accomplished women musicians in both past societies and different parts of the world (Fine 2007). However, these same studies also reveal that women in music came under strict regulation; their access to and ability to remain in the music world were governed by social rules whose effect was that women only exceptionally became professional musicians or else only practiced professionally for a limited time or in a limited spatial range. Young bourgeois girls and women in the nineteenth century in Europe sang or played piano as amateurs, in private, and within the framework of a quality education (Lenoir 1979). Courtisans or nuns could sing or play instruments in clearly circumscribed social and geographical contexts (Sultanova 2005).[1] Only a few exceptional women—exceptional in terms of family background or social networks—experienced the exceptional destiny of becoming musicians (Green, Ravet 2005; Launay 2006).

The emergence of professional women musicians,[2] free to take the path of musical creativity and independent practice of their art, is by contrast a recent phenomenon, one that runs parallel to the female professional liberation movement that traversed western worlds in the twentieth century (Schweitzer 2002). But while women have had access to the professional practice of music for approximately the last twenty years, they still encounter many obstacles along that path, and those obstacles differentiate their destinies from male musicians' professional trajectories. Professional women musicians are still a minority in rock, pop, jazz and techno music, and when they are present in those worlds they are seldom in the same league with men when it comes to attaining fame.

This article brings to light the social processes that both underlie women's access to the music profession in western countries at the dawn of the twenty-first century and account for the difficulties they have getting into that professional world, staying in it, and gaining recognition in it—difficulties greater than those facing men. This is therefore not a historical inquiry into the emergence of independent professional women musicians nor an enlightened synthesis of current research. Instead, I identify the social processes (processes that necessarily extend beyond specific geographical, social or musical cases) that both made it possible for the professional worlds of western music to open up to women at the start of this century and continue to make it more difficult for them (than for men) to get into those western worlds and stay in them while obtaining recognition—despite the fact that, formally speaking, women and men in those worlds have equal rights.

Before moving to the heart of the matter, it is worth taking a brief conceptual detour to better identify the understanding behind this sociological analysis. The place of women (compared to that of their male colleagues) in professional music worlds will be examined in light of the concept of gender. Differences between the sexes are the result of social, historical and political constructions that come into play constantly in the context of interaction. This analysis aims to identify how "gender is done" (West and Zimmerman 1987), the understanding being that "sex-class makes itself in the organization of face-to-face interaction, for here [in such interaction], understanding about sex-based dominance can be employed as a means of deciding who decides, who leads, and who follows" (Goffman 1997). Furthermore, apprehending gender in the process of "making itself" presupposes relating men's and women's in situ behavior. This is what makes it possible to "think through the social relations between the sexes"; since "each sex category is defined exclusively in relation to the other sex, 'neither can be studied separately, as least not without having been fully conceptualized as a component of the same structural system' (Mathieu 1971: 37)" (Roux, Perrin, Pannatier and Cossy 2005: 7).

Examining the social processes that underlie the feminization of western professional musical worlds implies giving priority to research studies that account, through both the methods they use and the views they construct, for the specific destiny of women with regard to their male colleagues, partners or friends. How are gender differences reproduced, legitimated and "transgressed"—i.e., infringed upon or defied—in situ in the worlds of rock, jazz, pop, light, classical, techno and world music?

Perilous access, difficulty gaining recognition

The number of research studies of gender in music has greatly increased, meaning that there are now finely detailed analyses of the specific difficulties women encounter when seeking access to classical orchestras or jazz, pop and rock groups or in obtaining leading positions (conductor, composer, pop music star), in maintaining themselves once "inside" those groups or roles, and in getting recognized in them. What major social processes underlie these specific obstacles to the emergence of male-female trajectory equality in musical worlds—worlds that are of course difficult for anyone to get into given the ever-sharp competition, work instability, and excess candidates?

Dangerous seductive power: from incessant desire to professional denigration

As far as audiences, art professionals of both sexes, and women artists' male colleagues are concerned, women artists are expected to have strong seduction capital. Surveys confirm Simone de Beauvoir's observation in her pathbreaking work that female artists are likely to be seductive women full of charm and mystery (Beauvoir 1949). Singer, instrumentalist, dancer, visual artist or novelist, "the" woman artist is surrounded by an erotic, seductive aura of enchantment. In reality, while this seductiveness may amount to a short-term resource for getting work, its main effect is to make level-headed, long-term recognition of women artists' professional qualities difficult to obtain, and to make it difficult for them to build or gain high-quality professional reputations.

Women rock musicians (Whiteley 1997), pop stars (Faupel, Schmutz 2011), Greek paradosiaka musicians (Hatzipetrou-Andronikou 2011), jazz singers and instrumentalists (Buscatto 2007) as well as female classical musicians (Escal, Rousseau-Dujardin 1999) are constantly confronted with the ambiguities implied by their strong seductive powers. If we follow the conclusions of these various studies, those powers—in the form of a "seductive" CD cover, "becoming" stage outfits, a way of handling relations with disc or show producers and diffusers, and "attractive" press photographs when a new CD comes out[3]—do indeed represent a resource in winning appreciation for their art. But women artists' seductive power is even more likely to operate as a negative stereotype that works to devalue their perceived professional ability and in the end complicates both full recognition of their professionalism by critics and colleagues and their ability to play in a relaxed, closely integrated way with male musician colleagues.

In the specific case of women jazz instrumentalists, the "feminine" staging of their bodies draws people's visual attention, interests journalists, and exercises seductive power on the male musicians they mix with (Buscatto 2007). Though all this may at first glance appear an advantage in a world that can be assumed to be relatively closed to women musicians, in fact such female seductive power constantly elicits reactions of professional denigration and devaluing, and these in turn hurt women musicians' professional reputations. What seemed a resource is thus likely to prove an obstacle that must be overcome rather than an effective tool for fully "living one's art."

As "public women" practicing their profession on stage in front of all, female musicians are confronted with a relative paradox. If they assert their physical "femaleness," they run the risk of being denigrated in a world governed by male values and conventions. They also lose any ability to prove they have authority and creativity, especially where musical leadership is concerned—that, is for music group leaders and orchestra conductors. Lastly, women musicians have trouble maintaining stable working relations with male musician colleagues, who regularly develop an excessively ardent desire for them. If on the other hand they deny their "femaleness" by assuming a neutral physical appearance, they run the risk of not interesting the colleagues, audiences, concert programmers and disk producers who are interested in women artists for their seductive powers, who want to be able to look at them, and who hire them on that basis. They therefore have trouble fully "living" their music and have to find other occupational directions.

The strength of pejorative gender stereotypes

This leads us to the second of the social processes that foster reproduction of gender-related differences; namely, the strength and persistence of gender stereotypes.[4] This too is damaging to women's long-term commercial, musical and professional success. Whether the female stereotypes associated with women musicians pertain to sexuality, seductiveness, motherhood, creative independence or virtuosity, they often go along with a disparaging attitude when it comes to assessing women's professional music abilities.

Consider the case of British and American pop music stars studied by Faupel and Schmutz (2011). Using critical reviews published in Rolling Stone, the authors provide a close, extremely revelatory two-part reading of the female stereotypes that women musicians have to deal with. Not only do comparable stereotypes hardly affect these women's male colleagues, but when they do, they do not have a negative effect. Faupel and Schmutz's demonstration is particularly enlightening in that it bears on major pop rock figures such as Madonna, Lauryn Hill, PJ Harvey, Janet Jackson, Sinead O'Connor and Janis Joplin; women we might have thought were immune to such difficulties. Comparing reviews of these female musicians' musical performances before and after they obtained commercial success, Faupel and Schmutz show not just the negative power of female stereotypes but also their relative persistence, even when the women musicians in question are assured of or have already achieved fame.

As close attention to the reviews of these female musicians published in Rolling Stone makes clear, while pejorative "female" stereotypes about femininity and sexuality become more subtle (rather than disappear) once artists have become famous, the themes of emotional authenticity and dependence on men in the music field loom larger after fame has been won. Not only are comparable stereotypes not used when male musicians are reviewed, but gender stereotypes only negatively affect women musicians' musical reputation, and therefore their chances of attaining enduring renown in the field of popular music. The authors convincingly conclude that above and beyond musical performances and produced works, women have to deal with specific obstacles when trying to obtain full recognition in the world of popular music. Defined as sex objects, assumed to owe their success to men, judged to have limited professional ability, these women artists have great difficulty acquiring a recognized, lasting place in the world of pop rock.

Another gender stereotype that may come into play is that the artist career is incompatible with motherhood. Women who are either pregnant or already mothers are assumed unable to commit themselves lastingly, seriously, reliably to highly demanding artistic activities. This result has been found by several studies. Analyzing the career of the first Swiss woman conductor, Hedy Salquin, in the 1960s, Philomène Graber (2004) shows how Salquin, regularly photographed in her domestic space, was perceived by potential employers as an artist who was not really available or reliable over the long term. Although she very much wished to practice the profession for which she had trained at the highest level, and although she immediately said she was available whenever the question was put to her, Salquin was not hired because of these "domestic" photos and thus could not practice the activity of orchestra conductor.

In a 1997 study on the gender issue in music, Lucy Green concluded that the existence of different gender stereotypes actually revealed the "neutral," invisible male norm of instrument-playing operative in the history of music. Public playing of a musical instrument is perfectly adapted to the social construction of maleness—i.e., virtuoso, independent, creative or active—which stands in opposition to "femaleness"—i.e., maternal, dependent, object of desire, weak or emotional, qualities assumed to be fundamentally contrary and unfavorable to the creative practice of music.

Heavily "male" social networks

Various research studies have demonstrated the importance of social networks for getting into fluid, open art worlds, staying in them, and building a reputation for oneself in them (Becker 1998 (1982); Faulkner 1985 (1971)). Those studies also bring to light how cooptation, here based on being and staying in a social network, is located at the intersection of technical skill criteria and judgments bearing on an individual's "personal" qualities. Cooptation is also facilitated by the intervention of close intermediaries: critics, external sources of support. The fact is that music worlds are men's worlds, and they prove relatively unwelcoming to women. Women are more likely than their male colleagues to find themselves "naturally" marginalized and even excluded from networks of the sort that ensure cooptation.

At the different stages of career-building in rock music (Ortiz 2004), "popular" music of various kinds (Whiteley 1997), classical music (Green, Ravet 2005) and jazz (Buscatto 2007), artistic social networks tend to favor men. In those social worlds, where women are a minority (and a minority that shrinks as we move up the reputation hierarchy), "male" cooptation modes favor men even when there is no apparent desire to exclude women. Researchers have not been able to offer a simple, univocal explanation for this, namely because it appears so "natural" to members of the implicated art worlds—including women—and the vast majority of observers. Two complementary explanations do emerge, however, from the body of aforecited research studies, though they are difficult to distinguish from each other in musician interaction.

The first reason often put forward has to do once again with women's seductive power over their male colleagues. This power is itself interpreted by means of pejorative social stereotypes: it is more difficult to imagine women (than men) as "full-fledged" colleagues. In fact, to steer clear of "bad experiences" such as getting a "bad" sexual reputation, suddenly being cut out of a project, having to deal with relational ambiguities in what is supposed to be cooperative work, women musicians learn early on to "turn off" their seductive power. They also try to behave irreproachably in professional terms to avoid being denigrated for their musical technique—a constant threat. But "turning off the seduction" and behaving irreproachably seem to imply a certain physical and human aloofness that works against the development of shared artistic understanding and mutual trust. Male artists may actually elicit this distancing move on women's part in order to avoid difficulties for themselves, e.g., jealousy from their current female life partner, which they have to be careful not to provoke. Furthermore, these studies suggest that women musicians whose dress and behavior are relatively "masculine" and who strongly assert their views "irritate," bore or otherwise bother male colleagues and intermediaries suffused with the opposite feminine ideal.

Complementarily, the fact that women are not as fully integrated into male social networks as men are is explained by the different types of socialization that males and females undergo from childhood on. Differences in the kinds of behavior that is expected from and valued and appreciated in women on the one hand, men on the other, and differences between men's and women's centers of interest are understood to play an important role in colleague cooptation. Though it may be pleasant to speak occasionally with a women colleague, it is considered preferable to spend significant time with colleagues on the same "wave length"—usually male ones. This explanation is particularly effective for music worlds where intense personal relationships and sharing around music are uppermost. The fact that women may become fed up with working according to male social modes and have difficulty living their musical life serenely may be explained in similar terms. Whereas male modes for assembling players and working together favor self-assertion, female modes are more likely to involve listening to each other and exchange. Since artists and their intermediaries favor simple relationships that are easy to construct, they "naturally" tend to construct a discriminatory, closed group world.

"Reconciling" professional life and family life

The difficulty of combining professional and family life is often put forward to explain women's difficulty gaining access to managerial, scientific, political and leading  activist positions or high, demanding social positions. This difficulty is indeed potentially to be found in the lives of women musicians and explains in part their tendency to withdraw from the artist life at various moments in their "career." However, it depends on the degree to which a given music world has been feminized, and it can therefore have quite variable influence on women's trajectories.

Male artists' wives or female partners play a major part in managing their private and professional lives. They adapt themselves to their partners' schedules (highly reputed partners travel regularly abroad or within France). If the couple has children (usually when the woman is over 30), the woman partner is in charge of most of the daily upbringing tasks and organization. These women also often help organize their partners' professional lives and artistic success, either directly, as when the woman herself works professionally in the art in question, or indirectly by providing a great deal of advice—and in some cases financial support—over time. Studies of female visual artists (Pasquier 1983) and writers (Naudier 2010), jazz musicians (Buscatto 2007), classical musicians (Coulangeon, Ravet 2003) and contemporary dancers (Sorignet 2004) show their heavy involvement in their male spouse's or partner's artistic path and how they make themselves available to handle family tasks.

These same surveys also reveal that women artists themselves do not have male partners willing to play this same role for them, meaning that these women artists—musicians, visual artists, writers and dancers—have to ensure not only that their own family and professional lives fit together but also that their professional life dovetails with their male partner's. The women musicians studied seem simply not to have met men willing to play the role of accompanying their careers over time, nor do they seem to expect their men to make themselves available in this way.

The issue then seems to focus on whether or not there are children. Professional women musicians generally seem to adhere to the ideology that the role of high-quality mother and the artist life are incompatible. But while that ideology informs the choices made by the women observed, it also seems subject, as a "constraint," to several interpretations, running from giving up one's art career altogether to managing motherhood in an atypical manner to refusing to have children.

Thus, to be able to realize their chosen "vocation," a segment of women artists, namely those operating in art worlds that are still heavily male, make radical choices consistent, in their minds, with that choice: not having children, not having stable partners. This was the case for a major proportion of pioneering women instrumentalists in French jazz, though they amount to only 4% of listed instrumentalists (Buscatto 2007). Moreover, those musicians say nothing about not having a male partner to manage their careers—some even say they left a partner who wanted children—but speak instead of their strong will to preserve the freedom afforded them by their choice, or their absence of desire for children. Motherhood, an additional constraint for their artist careers (a constraint absent from the trajectories and discourse of male musicians), becomes what has to be sacrificed if one is to express oneself as an artist.

Among pioneer women musicians who have had children, career management modes (highly variable) may prove innovative. Some women, helped by their own mothers, male partners, sisters or friends, manage to rear their children while continuing along their chosen artistic path. A tiny minority of women artists share both private and professional roles with their male partner, namely if he is much older and has already constructed a strong professional reputation for himself. Yet others put their careers on hold for the time it takes to raise children, or, either voluntarily or not, only begin an artist career after seeing their children through childhood.

In more fully "mixed" social milieus—i.e., where women make up at least 30% of practitioners, as in classical music—women have a greater propensity (than men) to turn away from the artist career, deemed overly demanding, and choose instead either a teaching career or a less prestigious artist career such as orchestra musician. Moreover, orchestral music is the only music world in which women have made a remarkable entry (Ravet, Coulangeon 2003).

Social wellsprings of as yet incomplete feminization

Though women musicians run into more obstacles than men on the road to professional status (and artistic recognition), they do now have some resources for gradually obtaining a place for themselves in the professional music landscape—in classical music, of course, which is ever more feminized, but also in the so-called "popular" varieties of music. Like women police officers, engineers, scientists and writers, a minority of women are managing to break through the "glass ceiling," a constant threat on the road to professional recognition (Buscatto, Marry 2009). They are gaining access to music worlds, managing to stay in them, and are in some cases recognized at the summit of the music hierarchy. This is being accomplished by means of individual and collective strategies that are bringing about the feminization of professional music worlds.

The power of rules, procedures and legislative and legal arrangements 

With the notable exception of "learned" music, which is part of the school curriculum, and strictly regulated music contest rules, music worlds do not set educational hurdles or pre-qualification rules that have to be overcome or complied with before a work of art can be sold or performed. However, in accordance with the democratization of education and the rising level of educational certification, music worlds have been "taken in hand by the school" (Verger 1982). Likewise, the "democratization of culture" and French public authorities' stated aim of making culture accessible to all social spheres throughout the country have been instrumental in funding new art spaces, structures and activities (Dubois 1999). Lastly, certain measures, part of a more general concern to promote women, have been put in place to facilitate women's professional practice of music. An example is the use of screens for classical orchestra instrumentalists during hiring auditions. These legal changes seem to explain in part the relative feminization of several musical worlds.

First of all, women's access to educational institutions has facilitated their entry into and maintenance within professional music worlds by making it possible to remove certain social barriers. Access to education programs ensures acquisition of the knowledge and skills necessary to take the entrance examinations and other tests that enable a candidate to advance in the given world. This is one of the reasons mentioned by Hyacinthe Ravet and Philippe Coulangeon to explain the fact that in France women are present to a greater degree in learned music worlds—worlds, that is, organized around educational institutions—than in popular music worlds, founded above all on the principle of cooptation by friends and peer regulation. Forty-five percent of learned music performers are women, while the figure in "popular" music is under 20% (Coulangeon, Ravet 2003).

The second explanation, directly related to the understanding that art worlds operate on the basis of active social networks, is that education experiences work to construct lasting social ties. This applies to female rock musicians, as they are likely to meet their playing partners in educational institutions (Ortiz 2003), as well as to women jazz instrumentalists, who are more likely than their male counterparts to have "gone through" music conservatories and jazz schools. It is in these contexts that women musicians construct their first practical collective experiences and meet people in connection with music in a way that proves decisive (Buscatto 2007).

The third reason, found by some studies, is that institutional musical training gives young women the skills necessary to "dare" to venture into this art world, enabling them to feel they are skillful enough to give it a try and embuing them with confidence about their chances of success. This analysis applies to women's recent entry into traditional Greek music, a phenomenon due to their training in Greek high schools, which is now equal to that of young men (Hatzipetrou-Andronikou 2011).

Other types of institutional guidance occasionally influence women's entry into music worlds, either by facilitating funding for the activities involved—music festivals, music-related publications, performance production—or developing cultural spaces that are more open to women. Public policy measures aimed at fostering the emergence of amateur artistic practice have helped some young women, and some later manage to go professional, as Laureen Ortiz observes of women rock musicians, who are much more likely than young men to practice, rehearse and play in studios or schools that are at least partially publicly funded (whereas young men play with "pals") (Ortiz 2004).

Lastly, a simple measure such as using screens for auditions when hiring classical orchestra musicians has a favorable effect on women's entry into classical music worlds simply because the jury listens "blindly," ignorant of the instrumentalist's sex. Two American economists have proved that North American women orchestra musicians owe more than 30% of their increased presence in major North American orchestras to the systematic use of "screens" during hiring auditions, as the screen makes them invisible during those auditions (Goldin, Rouse 2000).

Assistance and dependence in homogamous professional-musician couples

There is at least a partial solution to the difficulty women musicians have getting integrated into male networks—meaning that they are less able than men to find work and gain recognition as competent musicians. While some studies observe strong professional homogamy for women classical musicians (Coulangeon 2004),[5] homogamy has also been observed for jazz women (Buscatto 2007). And while homogamy is fundamental in explaining how women musicians manage to remain in music worlds, it also explains the eminent vulnerability of those musicians, namely when they lose their male partner on the occasion of a breakup or professional failure or when the members of the couple have not made the same choice.

Consider the world of French jazz, for example. In this heavily male, gender-marked world, women singers or instrumentalists often live with professional jazzmen, usually musicians but in some cases jazz producers or program organizers (Buscatto 2007). The fact is that the woman jazz musician's network is usually the same as her male partner's, which is first and foremost his—this is not an equally shared network. In such cases, when the love relationship comes to an end, the "network" disappears for the woman musician, who then has to rebuild both her personal and professional life from scratch. For the minority of women jazz musicians who do not have a male jazz-professional life partner it is hard not only staying in the jazz world but also maintaining professional work partnerships over the long term. The "natural" way these women then develop is to find relationships outside the jazz world, and in some cases even to withdraw entirely from that world.

Seductive power as a resource

Another resource available to women musicians—though often involuntarily, at least the first few times—is to use the particular interest they elicit among jazz critics, programmers and producers who want to "support" women musicians. These actors in the various music worlds are favorable to producing "female" music groups and events that highlight a woman musician (concerts, CDs, articles). Their motivations are largely commercial, since, as seen above, women musicians "seduce" audiences and readerships. They are also occasionally political (though such moves remain sporadic), as some critics, producers and diffusers are increasingly bothered by the absence of women in their music worlds.

While women instrumentalists fear being denigrated for playing "women's music" or appearing as "sexy" on a poster or CD cover, they nonetheless make use of this interest, accepting situations that work in their favor, using their seductive power as at least a short-term professional resource. This applies to jazz (Buscatto 2007), classical music (Escal, Rousseau-Dujardin 1999), pop rock (Faupel, Schmutz 2011) and traditional Greek music (Hatzipetrou-Andronikou 2011).

When they become conscious of doing this, they say they are trying to escape the unfavorable stereotypes linked to being female, specifically to being women musicians. This is shown in Reguina Hatzipetrou-Andronikou's 2011 survey of women instrumentalists in traditional Greek music. Since playing music on stage amounts to an artistic performance, it can be said that these women instrumentalists "second" that performance with a "gender performance" (Butler 1990). They dress, make themselves up and arrange their hair carefully and attentively before going on stage, and they do so, they say, "out of respect for the audience."

Whereas leisure clothes are usually appreciated for men, women musicians feel they have to dress up for their concerts. In this way they assert their version of seductive yet subdued, pleasant "femininity"—femininity without excess. While some Greek women musicians say they have always groomed themselves with care, others say they have only gradually adopted this practice. But all say that doing so is a means of expressing their respect for the audience. For these Greek women musicians, this practice makes them a "value-added" in the milieu. Physical femininity is thus perceived by these women as a resource because it encourages employers to hire them, the understanding being that the presence of a woman on stage will capture the audience's attention just as exclusively female music groups do. However, these musicians are also careful to keep their distance from what they call "bad" femaleness, namely that associated with women singers, who (the understanding is) overexpose their bodies and seem to be trying to sexually entrance their audiences.

Obviously the relevance of the opposition between subdued seductive power and overtly "sexy" seductive power varies by geographical and musical context. But in all cases, seductive power is a commercial resource that most of the female musicians studied in these various milieus think it well to use or otherwise confront. While some explicitly refuse to use it—at the risk of not getting hired or being rejected—others use it heavily—at the risk of being denigrated over the long term—while yet others try to use it in a subdued way in order to benefit from it by getting more work without being denigrated on the professional scale, an equation that seems quite hard to balance over time.

Arranging to play under "protected" conditions

Another wellspring of "transgression" observed in various musical contexts is women musicians' ability to organize music practice situations in which they are relatively protected from the risks that pejorative gender stereotypes subject them to and from the effects of men's and women's differing notions of musical interaction.

Jazz is highly revealing here of what is involved for women (in contrast to men) when it comes to managing musical relations, because jazz is first and foremost improvisational music involving ever-renewed encounters with other musicians (Buscatto 2007, 2010). Nonetheless, the women instrumentalists I observed tend to prepare their music sessions in great detail—even when the plan is to improvise—and to grant priority to stable musical relations. In these ways they work to protect themselves from "unpleasant surprises" in musical interaction. This tendency in turn makes them appear competent, reliable, serious colleagues to their male musician counterparts, though it may also make them seem timorous and averse to risk.

Women jazz musicians prefer stable situations, even in moments defined by the opposite intention—improvisation and impromptu creation. They are more likely than men not to want to play in jams (the impromptu, free-wheeling sessions that follow programmed concerts, training sessions or gatherings of friends). Women instrumentalists also say they prefer stable music groups and lasting partnerships, and this is confirmed by detailed analysis of how they collaborate with other musicians over time. Women instrumentalists tend to return to musician partners with whom they have already worked well; they find greater musical and relational quality in such encounters than in others.

Such encounters often include their jazzman life partner, since, as mentioned, the milieu is characterized by strong professional homogamy for women. Lastly, when it comes to playing, these women are more likely than male musicians to ensure that the structure works by organizing everything that can be beforehand: stable partners, written repertories, clear role distribution. Once these matters are in place, they can let their male colleagues take temporal and behavioral liberties—let them "do as they like" between two pieces. If my (numerous) observations of male leaders are to be believed, at moments in the performance where a male leader is likely to start out alone or make a caustic joke to get the musicians’ attention, women leaders let men act more freely while gradually introducing their own, more personal rhythms. In fact, this difference leads some women (a very small minority) to prefer all-women jazz groups precisely because women's social logic is more "cooperative." Odile Tripier confirms this observation for women's rock (1998).

In the course of the twentieth century, western professional music worlds began opening their doors to women musicians just as they had always been open to men. But though classical orchestras quickly became feminized in the different western countries, women still constitute a very small minority in the various types of so-called "popular" music: rock, jazz, pop and world. A detached comparison of these worlds allows for identifying the social processes that not only produce these gender-related differences but also enable women to "transgress" them—that is, to defy or overcome them—albeit not entirely.

Music worlds are not yet favorable to women musicians' entry, nor to their maintaining themselves in those worlds or gaining artistic recognition in them. Women musicians' strong seductive power, the strength of depreciative female stereotypes, the roles of lover and mother, and heavily male social networks all work against women becoming active professional musicians and make the musician life harder for them to realize than it already is for male musicians. But up against these difficulties specific to their position as women in a man's world, women practitioners of the art of music use resources that enable them to partially defy or overcome this social reality. Favorable public policy measures, such as the use of a screen during classical music hiring auditions, and access to prestigious music education institutions are major resources for women musicians.

They also learn to "turn off the seduction" in order to avoid unpleasant experiences that will work against their being regularly hired and recognized as artists. They are likely to try to create stable, lasting musical situations that will offer them relative protection from the risks inherent in being women. Another resource is the homogamous male partner, often a musician, who partially "protects" them by enabling them to benefit from a well established musician network. The intense interest of producers, critics and audiences for women deemed highly "seductive" or "exceptional" is another lever enabling them to play their music as it provides them access to specific resources. Lastly, though this is not at all a widespread phenomenon in music, it is important to note the actions of certain "women's" associations or festivals aimed to provide women with specific resources for obtaining recognition as composers (Launay 2006) or performers (Schilt 2004).

While the lasting importance of educational institutions and strictly regulated contests seems to explain much of the recent feminization of various professional music worlds, the other "transgressive" strategies listed above seem more like tactics reserved to "oversocialized" women;[6]  that is, women who are once again musically, humanly and socially exceptional. This explains both how few women there are in positions of authority in classical music—orchestra conductors, section heads—and the heavily male character of the different varieties of so-called "popular" music, i.e., music that follows little in the way of formal rules. For though these exceptional women with their high musical reputations may succeed in fully "living" their art, they have not succeeded at all in changing the rules of the professional game in those heavily male worlds (Moss Kanter 1993 (1977)). And their trajectories continue to be riddled with specific dangers that either force them to give up professional music, or to accept lower employment and recognition levels than their male counterparts, or to tire of the fight to play music "in any case" and "choose" to move into more welcoming contexts; i.e., music teaching or other performing arts.

If professional music worlds are to be further feminized in the coming years, it is reasonable to think that this will happen thanks to the potential of what I have been calling "transgression": moves by certain professional actors to decry and combat the discriminatory nature of these music worlds; the development of yet more powerful educational institutions and professionalization process rules, namely for "popular music"; changes in contemporary societies' stereotypes and gender-related roles. All of these movements and changes are possible. But it is only through detailed, precise research inquiry, conducted in the different loci of these music worlds, that we can hope to reveal them in the years and decades to come.

References

Beauvoir Simone (de) Le deuxième sexe, Paris, Gallimard, Folio, 1976 (1949).

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