Equal At Last? Women In Jazz, By The Numbers

In the 2019 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll, five of the top 10 new releases were recordings led or co-led by women artists — a startling 50%. In fact, it is the largest number of projects led by women in the top 10 since the annual poll began 14 years ago, surpassing 2018, when women comprised a third of those rankings.

That would seem to be good news for a musical community that has been frustratingly slow to embrace women musicians. Women in jazz have traditionally been singers, a role that allows them to be dismissed as entertainers who are not fundamental to jazz as "serious" art. Few female instrumentalists — or, for that matter, composers, arrangers and bandleaders — have become part of the music's story, one that stretches back to the late 19th century.

But with the results of the 2020 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll only days away from publication, it is an opportune moment in which to revisit — and question — claims of women's progress. Any of the optimistic assessments occasioned by this poll, and in the wake of jazz's #Me Too stirrings in recent years, are likely to be premature. Only when women's participation in the music has been clearly defined, documented and measured can we be certain of any improvement in their collective status — or lack thereof.

To that end, NPR Music commissioned Lara Pellegrinelli and a team of independent reporters to analyze the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll and see what concrete data could reveal about the role of gender in this particular critics' year-end list and the status of women jazz artists generally speaking. Although the findings are currently limited to a gender binary, dividing artists into unequivocal categories for women and men, we acknowledge the presence of a broader spectrum of identities than our project was able to capture, including cisgender women and men, transgender women and men and those with non-binary, gender non-conforming and gender queer identities.

By definition, lists are hierarchical. The politics of the communities who create them can be found embedded within them. The issues raised by this poll have relevance well beyond jazz for all sorts of critics' year-end lists. Like , a feminist intervention in the popular music canon, our inquiry also offers an opportunity to challenge list-making as a means of arriving at critical consensus that results