Why So Few Women Songwriters?

Even in the Taylor Swift Era, men continue to dominate pop songwriting. How come?

Songwriting can be a good job or a good side gig. The intellectual property rights in American legislation for composing a popular song can be amazingly lavish. If you write an enduringly popular song (such as a Christmas standard), you will get mailbox money for the rest of your life, and then your heirs will get checks for another 70 years.

Say you were born in 2000 and in 2025 you came up with your catchy tune, and you live to be 80, another 55 years. Your heirs will be entitled to royalties for another 70 additional years, a total of 125 years, or out to 2150 AD.

The 2002 comedy About a Boy features Hugh Grant playing an affluent layabout who spends his days on luxuries like having his hair “expensively tousled” at the salon. He doesn’t seem to work, and, being Hugh Grant, he feels very little guilt over his good fortune.

How can he afford this lifestyle? Finally, the movie reveals the source of his wealth: his father had composed the novelty Christmas hit “Santa’s Super Sleigh,” which has become an enduring part of Baby Boomers’ holiday seasons.

So, I encourage anybody with a knack for songwriting to give it a try.

But that leads to a conundrum. Women are extremely well-represented in the 21st Century as pop music performing idols. Likewise, the mainstream pop audience is dominated by teenage girls (while young men play computer games or narrowly follow, say, one of 83 varietals of metal music or other niches that generate little major wealth).

So, women must dominate writing hit songs these day, right?

From The Pudding:

In 2022, hit songs had 6 songwriters on average: 5 men and 1 woman.

But the average conceals a remarkable fact about the 42 songs that cracked the Top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100.

While half of the songs had a songwriting team of all men…

Only one had a songwriting team of all women.'

That one song - Kate Bush’s “Running Up that Hill (A Deal with God)” - was written in 1985 and only saw a resurgence because it was featured in the popular Netflix show Stranger Things.

How often has a top 5 hit been written only by women in the last 10 years? It’s likely rarer than you think.

From 2010-2021, there were 197 hit songs written only by men vs. 4 hit songs written only by women.

Keep in mind that songwriting credits now seem to be more generous and broad-based spread-the-wealth than they used to be. In the Beatles days, John and Paul had an agreement that they would share credit for each other’s songs 50-50 (even though they largely composed alone). George and Ringo would only get credit for songs that were largely their own ideas. (Which is why George’s songs — e.g., “Something,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” or “Here Comes the Sun” — are often so good. He didn’t have the power in the band to force a stinker like “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” on them.)

But, today, I’d guess that George would sometimes get, say, a 1/8th share of the songwriting royalties on a Lennon-McCartney tune for coming up with a cool bridge or whatever, and occasionally Ringo would get 1/16th for a novel drum fill or other contribution. (Legally, it appears that the names of all individuals getting any songwriting royalty must be published, but the exact shares they are getting does not have to be made public.)

So, more people get partial songwriting credits than in Lennon-McCartney’s day. In 2022, for instance, 42 songs made the Billboard Top 5. Only 4 of the 42 were written by solo composers (and the Kate Bush and Wham revivals were from the 1980s). Another four were written by two people (with Taylor Swift co-writing three of those hits). At the other pole, a couple of hits each had 14 listed composers.

Presumably, stars want to get good reputations for fairness. For example, Drake appeared on seven of the 42 biggest hits of 2022, always sharing the spotlight as a performer with at least one other star. On those 7 hits, the average number of individuals awarded a share of the songwriting credit is over eight.

I know nothing about popular music since, say, 2010, but I’ve seen the name Drake a lot over many years. I’m guessing that Drake has a good reputation within the industry as a non-greedy, fair-minded collaborator, so a lot of talented people want to work with him because he’s known for being agreeable to reasonable distributions of songwriting royalties. (Or maybe not. I am an old man who knows nothing about the last 15 years of pop history.)

Was the male domination of song-writing always like this?

It’s hard to say. Women in the Victorian age were strongly encouraged to learn to play the piano and sing.

Not surprisingly, some wrote songs. For example, blind Fanny Crosby (1820-1915) composed 8,000 Protestant hymns and gospel songs

What about the Great American Songbook Era of roughly 1920-1960?

Women were quite popular as singers, but much less so as composers. I’m coming up with lower single digit percentages for famous songs written by women in this era. Dorothy Fields was a prominent lyricist and George Gershwin’s girlfriend Kay Swift composed the music for a successful Broadway show in 1930. (After Gershwin died, Swift married a cowboy and moved to his ranch, which must have been a change.

She turned it into the movie Never a Dull Moment.)

Why were women composers so rare at the peak of American songwriting?

I don’t know. A few theories might be:

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