The Grammy awards have been accused of under-representing women in nominations and awards and facilitating a female-positive smokescreen to hide the fact. “The Missing Voices Of Women In Music And Music News”, a report by Luba Kassova of Addy Kassova Audience Strategy, a London-based audience-research body, complains that women received only one in five Grammy nominations and wins between 2017 and 2024 and that in the nominations for the 2025 Grammys just awarded, 69% of nominees were men and only 28% women. The report adds that Grammy publicity is skewed to mask the “marginalisation” of women. It says that 2024 news coverage highlighted a clean sweep for women in the four most-coveted Grammy categories but that the underlying reality was that only 22% of the Grammys in the four categories were awarded to women, the remaining 78% going to men – male songwriters, producers, engineers and mixers.
The report, some 30,000 words long and part-funded by the Gates Foundation, also attacks female under-representation in music production and media, saying that “men dominate all major touchpoints in a piece of music’s journey from inception to recognition – from male producers and industry executives to the male lens of specialist music news, with eight in ten most senior music editors in specialist music media being men”. Kassova recalls that in 2018, former Recording Academy president and CEO Neil Portnow unfairly remarked that women “need to step up” if they want to win awards.
Jazz Journal’s current panel of writers is entirely male, although women have presented themselves and written for JJ over the years. A notable early participant was Gina Wright, who covered elements of the British blues boom, including a review of Cyril Davies and a historic appearance by John Lee Hooker at the Flamingo in Soho in 1964. In the 1980s Sally-Ann Worsfold, wife of then editor Nevil Skrimshire, was frequently seen in JJ’s pages. Sally Evans-Darby contributed extensively and impressively in the 2000s before family demands forestalled further participation, and a series of female Durham University undergraduates wrote for a year or two in the 2020s before falling silent after graduation.
JJ welcomes contributions from good female jazz writers, but it might be an uphill battle despite the open door: Luba Kassova says that “a male-dominated industry becomes culturally exclusionary and challenging for women to enter, thrive and be recognised in”.
Meanwhile, last month a London press agency announced the launch of “a game-changing initiative titled The Year of Women In Jazz” from Women In Jazz, an “incredible organisation” it had just started working with. The 12-month YWIJ programme sought to bring together music, live performances, mentorships, panel discussions and “so much more”. The aim of Women in Jazz was to amplify “the voices of women in Jazz [sic] and creative [sic] inclusive opportunities to support and further their careers”.
The agency said that the YWIJ is a “direct response to a year of in-depth research conducted within the Jazz community” which revealed “significant under-representation” of women in jazz and a “pressing need for change”, although the consequences for jazz of not addressing that need aren’t identified. The research found that 55.8% of respondents agreed that women are “very poorly” or “poorly” represented in jazz in the UK.
Part of the initiative is the release of a single in each month of the year, with the singles to be combined into an album for release later in the year. The first of the singles was Uno Punto Uno by Italian bass player Rosa Brunello. Another artist supported by WIJ is Rebecca Vasmant, whose second album, Who We Are Becoming, features, according to its publicist, “a 25-strong collective of musicians on a sonic journey exploring themes of identity, equality, femininity, and self-growth”. A sample can be heard of Rooted, a single from the album, released end of January. Women In Jazz counts among its “incredible” partners Soho House, the Love Supreme Festival, the London Jazz Festival, Soho Radio and others.
