Boy Progress Radio?
So, I’ve been working on updating the Artists page here at BPR, and I realized that our artists are heavily skewed to Asian American men.
We have 24 different artists/groups listed we have*:
- 1 compilasian album that is mixed gender
- 2 solo artists that are women
- 4 groups that feature both men and women
- 19 groups or artists that feature men (though some have lots of people involved, and guests, the main artists seem to be just men)
So what’s going on? Is this a reflection of the BPR staff? (Severely lacking in estrogen. Wanna pitch in?) Or is this a reflection of independent Asian American music? Have stereotypes about Asian American women affected who attempts to go into the entertainment industry? Is it just because there aren’t any female Asian American drummers besides Lane Kim? Or do Asian American men just rock?
What do you think?
* If my math is off, please let me know. If I’m overlooking people or making assumptions about people’s gender identity, I apologize. The main point is that we have a lot of male artists.
Last 5 posts by delia
- Rocket 2 U - May 13th, 2008
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Tags: Commentary.
I have to think a bit more about whether the gender distribution of the artists on BPR is representative of the overall Asian American musician population. Maybe some research will be necessary before this question can be answered.
Is it possible that independent of race there are just simply more male groups than there are female groups? I don’t have time to determine the ratio of male rock groups to female rock groups, but that would be an interesting data point. And then, it would be useful to determine if the ratio of Asian American male groups to female groups is statistically significant relative to that ratio.
Just a thought.
i would say that the lack of gender diversity in music artists reflects something…maybe the lack of gender diversity among contributors, but not the scene in general. because off the top of my head i can think of half a dozen asian american women who we don’t have their music - some never responded to an initial inquiry, some we may just have no connection with, some…eh, who knows?
but i hope that anyone who knows artists - man or woman or whatever - who isn’t on BPR as of now could think about letting them know about getting at us. the more the more better.
Hmm… that’s good if it is true. A related question might be, why were the males more prompt in their response to our inquiries? Why were the men responding and not the women? Is it us? Are we intimidating? Man… if that’s the case, I’m going to have to re-evaluate myself.
[...] in the early days of Boston Progress Radio, Delia noted the gender imbalance of the artists on our station. (Yeah, I know that was only a few months ago, but sometimes it seems [...]