Where Are All The Women In Metal?

Women have been liberating themselves for the last 50 years or so. My doctor, my veterinarian, my CPA...all women. As a software engineer I've spent years in the industry working side by side with incredibly bright, creative and self-assured software engineers that just happen to be women. I've played softball alongside women, I've skied with women and I fully believe that women are every bit as capable as men.

But, there just aren't that many women in heavy music. To be fair, there are certainly some women in heavy music: Otep Shamaya, Tarja Turunen, Anette Olzon, Tanja Lainio, ... OK, so I didn't have that much trouble generating those names and that's the tip of the iceberg. But still, it's odd. Each of those women fronts an otherwise all-male band. Even Joan Jett and Lita Ford, integral members of the all-female band, The Runaways, have spent the bulk of their successful years in music with male bands backing them. Sure, in addition to the Runaways, there's Girlschool, The Donnas and Kittie but for every example like that, there are 100s of all-male bands.

Why is it that my son is already showing an interest in electric guitar, while my daughter is focused on singing? They both like heavy music but, somehow, the innate desire to be an instrumentalist in a rock band (a desire I've felt for most of my life) shows up in my son and not my daughter? Perhaps it's simply a vicious cycle. There are very few female role models playing instruments in heavy bands. And, the more I think about it, the more I think that's true across much of contemporary music. It's not hard to find female lead singers, or backup singers in many mainstream styles but the list of female, well-known, accomplished instrumentalists is awfully short. Yeah, I can think of a few off the top of my head: Lita Ford, Nancy Wilson, and Lzzy Hale. But it's not a lot. You don't often see women on the cover of Guitar Player or Modern Drummer and that's strange.

Go to see a symphony and often there are more women in the string section than men. In medical fields (human and animal) women are shooing up more often than men. But go to a massive summer metal festival and you won't see many women on stage.

Maybe we're still fighting the perception that women are there as decoration, for visual stimulation. Certainly that would explain why women do show up as front people for bands in much greater proportion than as instrumentalists. That bugs me, because there are so many other traditionally male jobs where women are competing (or even out-competing) with men. Many of those are highly unglamorous and yet women are still drawn to those jobs. When I was apprenticing at KGLT, I scheduled myself with Cara, a DJ for decades who plays heavier music than I do. She can out-swear and out-tough me any day. But she doesn't play an instrument; she isn't in a band.

My wife, Nancy, theorized that perhaps boys are encouraged more to be instrumentalists than women. Except, how many of us heavy guitarists were actually encouraged to follow careers in music? I wasn't. Most of my musician friends weren't. Yeah, my parents weren't negative about my music interests; they let my bands rehearse at our house, they came to gigs, they supported me but I was never given the impression that becoming a professional musician was a good life choice... So, it's hard to imagine that there's a big disparity in parental support between boys and girls when it comes to playing in rock bands.

Honestly, I'm not completely sure why so few women choose to play guitar, bass or drums. We know from classical music that they are just as capable of virtuosity as men are. From many other fields, like medicine, law, business, politics, etc. we know that women can go toe-to-toe with men. Maybe it's only a matter of time. Nearly every contemporary musical style was pioneered by men. Perhaps what it'll take is a new genre, led primarily by women, where they define the rules, the style, the personas. One way or another, though, I hope that when my daughter hits her teens that she can find comfort in music, the same way I did. I can't imagine how I could have gotten through junior high without music as a refuge and I hope that option is equally available to the unconventional, non-conformist, dreamers out there, like me, that just happen to have two XX chromosomes. For me, life would suck without guitar and I wouldn't subject anyone, regardless of gender, to a life without the escape and the reward of musical immersion.

What are your thoughts?