How Badly Do We Need More Female Conductors?

The media claim that women conductors face an uphill climb. The data suggests otherwise.

I hope that readers will excuse both my silence over the last few weeks (which have been spent writing this article) and the length of the resulting product. When writing about a topic like gender in music, it’s important to offer context and entertain contrary views—both of which take space, though I’d call it space well spent. For readers in search of a “TL;DR” version, I urge you to scroll down about halfway to the first table of data.

Last year, I attended a subscription concert at a leading American orchestra. The program consisted largely of meat-and-potatoes late romantic classics—the kinds of works you spend your early conducting career carving into your memory. On the podium was the orchestra’s own assistant, a female conductor in her early 30s.

Sitting in the audience, I was struck by two things:

First was how underwhelming the concert was. It was clear that the conductor was nervous. At the intermission, my companions—a married couple of insightful, fair-minded music lovers—remarked on her seeming inability to get her head out of the score. She was not connecting with the musicians or relating to them, and she was therefore ceding leadership to them. They were conducting the concert, and their house interpretation of the music—while inoffensive and generally together—was uninspired. They needed a leader.

In other words, her performance was typical assistant conductor work.

And that was the second surprising thing, because for a major orchestra to offer a subscription concert to its assistant conductor is a rare occurrence. It’s somewhat more common today than it once was, but it remains rare. Traditionally assistants conduct education, family, and pops concerts, and “cover” for the music director and guest conductors so they can step in in the event of an emergency (which happens often in an industry that regularly trots out maestri in their 80s and even 90s). If this concert had been an emergency cover job, her performance would have been adequate.

But it wasn’t. This was her concert. She had months to prepare it. Her headshot was on the program book. Knowing how rare it is to see a young assistant programmed in a subscription concert, I had come expecting to see a generational talent in embryo—another Mehta or Dudamel or Mäkelä. Instead, I was confused to see a typical assistant conductor, in need—like most assistant conductors—of another decade or two of seasoning to add value at one of the great orchestras in the world. It wasn’t that she was any worse than her peer assistant conductors: she wasn’t. It was that those peers, male or female, wouldn’t have gotten this opportunity to begin with.

Or so I thought.

Women in Conducting

Historically, conducting was an almost entirely male field. That fact will surprise precisely no one. As the conducting profession came of age in the early 20th century, not only were women discouraged from getting on the podium, but conducting came to be identified in the public mind with principally masculine virtues: control, dominance, power. Watch Fritz Reiner conduct the Chicago Symphony in Beethoven’s Egmont Overture in 1954, and you can feel it. There’s no give-and-take with the orchestra, not an inch of slack. It’s all certainty, all authority. Listen to Arturo Toscanini threaten to give his bass section a “kick in the ass” for coming in late. Here we hear the voice of a Roman general disciplining his troops, not a musical collaborator.

Starting in the 1970s, however, this began to change. A new generation of conductors came of age, introducing us to maestri like Carlos Kleiber and Georges Prêtre. Those men, among many others, demonstrated that conductors could achieve sublime musical results by friendly invitation as effectively as through executive order, perhaps even more effectively. In the closing decades of the century, this new concept of conducting began to overtake the old.

Conductors were encouraged to be unique—even idiosyncratic—individuals. They were celebrated for their interpretive abilities and singular style of relating to musicians, not just for their uncompromising standards or iron will. Orchestras came to understand that what they needed on the podium was not a musician-warrior, but a musician. This evolution in expectations, coinciding as it did with the rise of women into managerial roles in business on both sides of the Atlantic, meant not only that women had a place in conducting, but that they could succeed on the podium on their own terms, without needing to impersonate men.

Unsurprisingly, a clutch of talented female conductors began to rise through the ranks during the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s. By the 2010s, these maestri—including Susanna Mälkki, Simone Young, JoAnn Falletta, and Xian Jiang—had become respected names on the international conducting circuit, appearing regularly both in European concert halls and in the U.S. (and, in Young’s case, Australia). Meanwhile, in the less glamorous trenches of the profession—in regional orchestras, community orchestras, and schools—women likewise began to gain a foothold.

When Marin Alsop was appointed music director of the Baltimore Symphony in 2007, becoming the first woman chosen to music direct a major American orchestra, she was lauded in the media as having “shattered” one of American classical music’s oldest glass ceilings. The implied expectation was that in her wake, the trickle of qualified women conductors would become a torrent; that as in the string and woodwind sections of the orchestra in the late 20th century after the introduction of blind auditions, or, indeed, in the medical or legal professions—long-excluded women would stream in to displace less qualified men, bringing the profession close to gender parity.

But it didn’t happen that way.

Last year, when Alsop reached the end of her 14-year tenure in Baltimore, she remained the only female music director of a major American orchestra. As one elegiac June 2021 headline in the New York Times put it, “a trailblazing female conductor is still alone on the trail.” Six months after that article was published, Alsop passed her place “alone on the trail” to another female conductor when the Atlanta Symphony announced the hiring of 56-year-old French conductor Nathalie Stutzmann.

As of now, Stutzmann is the only female music director of a major U.S. orchestra. There is, likewise, only one female music director of a major U.S. opera company: the San Francisco Opera’s Eun Sun Kim.

Lack of Opportunity?

Like many observers, I once assumed that the main reason for the lack of female music directors was that conservative elements in the industry—other conductors, musicians, administrators, and audiences—weren’t ready to see a woman on the podium. I’d read the quotations from old-world stars in the conducting profession—always the same few quotes, incidentally—alleging the ineptitude of women conductors. For instance, Russian conductor Yuri Temirkanov’s assertion that “the essence of the conductor’s profession is strength. The essence of a woman is weakness.”

Or Finnish master teacher Jorma Panula’s suggestion that women conductors should confine themselves to “feminine music. Bruckner or Stravinsky will not do, but Debussy is OK. This is purely an issue of biology.” (Needless to say, Panula did not enjoin his male students to avoid Debussy.) Seldom is it noted, however, that two of the brightest female stars on the conducting circuit today, Mälkki and Stutzmann, were Panula’s students. (And neither shies away from Bruckner or Stravinsky.)

Temirkanov and Panula were oft-cited in media reports about the dearth of female conductors ten years ago, and continue to be cited today. As Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker back in 2013, “the principle of male power is so deeply ingrained in the mythology of the conductor that sentiments such as [Temirkanov’s] are still not uncommon, although they are seldom expressed so bluntly in public.” The implication, of course, was that even as a small circle of female conductors had begun to gain acceptance and acclaim, and orchestras had regularly begun to feature them, those women’s successes simply masked the industry’s latent prejudices.

Even with another decade for the orchestra world to acclimate to the presence of female conductors, the conventional wisdom is that nothing has changed. One status report on women conductors in the New York Times last year, for instance, claims that women “continue to face stereotypes that only men can serve as maestros. They also grapple with the perception that they do not have enough experience to lead elite ensembles.” These continuing perceptions, the article suggests, are likely due to the lack of “women and people of color on hiring committees” and “a lack of diversity among orchestra board members,” which are “about 58 percent male and 92 percent white.” In the article, President of the Cincinnati Symphony Jonathan Martin blames the lack of female conductors on institutions (presumably like his own): “It was an issue of opportunity. It was never an issue of talent.”

For a long time, I found these arguments compelling. I also found compelling the claim that women receive fewer opportunities because they lack the professional network that men have. This lack of social infrastructure, according to the New York Times, limits women’s opportunities with top orchestras: “Orchestras . . . have historically given women fewer opportunities to lead ensembles as guests, making it difficult for them to practice and to build relationships with administrators and players.” (The use of the perfect rather than past tense strongly implies that this “historical” bias has continued into the present). Another report last year by a Chicago area music critic makes this accusation explicit, claiming that “women guest conductors are still a rarity at the world’s leading symphonic halls and opera houses.”

As women conductors work to cultivate their professional networks, we are told to expect a long wait. As the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chief executive Chad Smith puts it in the Times, “Conducting doesn’t happen overnight. There’s a lag time here, which is something we’re all struggling with.” “Change will come,” one Philharmonic executive (likely Smith) adds, “only when women are allowed to build long-term relationships with orchestras.”

For a while, that made sense to me. But by the time the Times published its status report on women conductors last year, several things about these old arguments were no longer adding up.

First was the matter of how well those few female conductors who had broken into the upper echelons of the profession were doing. Rumors were flying that Alsop was a contender to replace Riccardo Muti as music director of the Chicago Symphony, widely regarded as America’s best orchestra. Stutzmann was a new appointee in Atlanta. Mälkki, Young, and Jiang were frequent guest conductors with top American orchestras. While these women remained a small minority of music directors, they didn’t seem to be having any problems advancing their careers or being taken seriously by orchestras around the world.

Second, there was the small rising generation of younger female conductors who seemed to be having no trouble securing guest slots with top orchestras around the country. The Chicago-based critic I cited earlier wrote just last year that “time and again women have proven their mettle on the podium, yet few have been able to build thriving careers.” But if that were true, someone must have forgotten to tell Karina Canellakis or Dalia Stasevska, both of whom have made nearly clean sweeps of the top-ten American orchestras over the last two seasons.

And I was noticing something else, too—that these days, guest opportunities seem to be extended not only to female conductors who had “proven their mettle,” but also increasingly to female conductors who had yet to do so. The concert I described in the introduction was the first I attended in which a relatively unseasoned female conductor received an opportunity she didn’t seem ready for, but it wouldn’t be the last. Several months later I had the same experience with a second orchestra, and then again with a third. Not only did these women seem to be getting opportunities that their male peers (for good reason) would not have gotten, but if women conductors needed decades more of social groundwork in order to get their big break, these young women certainly had not.

There is no doubt in my mind that at one point, women conductors faced nearly insurmountable barriers. But I began to wonder whether those barriers genuinely remained in place. So I turned to the actual data for answers.

What We Would Expect to See

In both the hard and social sciences, it is customary first to lay out what we expect the data to tell us if our hypothesis is correct, and then to test it. If our hypothesis is that women continue to represent a small proportion of conductors due to lack of opportunity in the industry, we would expect at least several of the following to be the case:

• That women who apply to conducting graduate programs are not getting in (proportionally to the number who want to get in)

• That women who graduate those programs are unable to find jobs

• That early-career women conductors are unable to gain access to career-accelerating fellowships, festivals, or competitions

• That women who get assistantships and starter jobs are not able to find music directorships

• That women who have earned their first music directorship are unable to access top-flight music directorships

We would further expect to see bottlenecks at each (or many) of these stages, where the number of women qualified enough to move to the next rung of the ladder—but held back by lack of opportunity—perpetually increases.

Due to the tight-lipped nature of university admissions offices, we may never be able to put the first two claims (about the intake end of the pipeline) to the test with real data. Anecdotally, I have my doubts. I have had my ear to the ground in several of the country’s most highly-regarded collegiate conducting programs, and most of them are accepting female students at a proportion higher than women’s share of the overall population of conductors (more data on this topic shortly).

And neither do female conducting graduates seem to me to be struggling to get jobs. I happen to personally know six doctor of musical arts (DMA) graduates in orchestral conducting from top schools who are between the ages of 25 and 35. Three are men and three are women, and there is no discernible difference in average talent between the male and female sides. At the moment, each of the three women has a tenure-track director of orchestral activities position at a university or a full-time assistantship with an orchestra. None of the three men do. That’s anecdotal evidence, and I leave it at that.

It is not at the intake end of the pipeline, however, but in the higher reaches of the profession, where claims of lack of opportunity are most often made. Those claims, unlike those at the intake end, can easily be evaluated with real data. This is where the wheels of the lack-of-opportunity argument truly fall off.

How Many Women Conductors Are There?

The most recent study on gender balance in the conducting profession dates to 2016, from a report released by the League of American Orchestras called “Racial/Ethnic and Gender Diversity in the Orchestra Field.” I direct the reader’s attention to p. 6 of the report, which contains a graph labelled “Gender Diversity: Conductors and Music Directors.” This graph, while somewhat confusingly laid out, gives us several valuable data points in interpreting the state of gender balance in conducting.

The graph shows the proportion of music directors (of the 800 League member orchestras) who are male and female between 2006 (when the League began collecting gender data) and 2016, as well as the proportion of “other” staff conductors (assistant, associate, resident, etc.) who are male and female over the same time frame.

Looking at the graph, you’ll notice that during the survey period, the numbers remained stagnant. Women represented 8.5% of music directors in 2006 and 9.2% in 2016. They represented 20.0% of other conductors in 2006 and 20.5% in 2016.

What can we take away from this?

Most importantly, we can form an estimate of the proportion of women in the conducting profession. We know that the number is between 9.2% and 20.5%, probably toward the middle, since the numbers of music directors and “other conductors” in the business are similar (large ensembles often have multiple subsidiary conductors, while small ensembles often have none). Based on this same League of American Orchestras dataset, other outlets have reported the 2016 overall percentage of women conductors as 14.6%. That seems reasonable, and we will use it as our estimate.

The chart’s division into music directors and “other conductors” strongly suggests two other things, both of which push back against the hypothesis that women are trying (but being held back) from pulling even with men in the conducting industry.

• First, the data suggests that over the survey period (2006-2016), the proportion of women entering the profession has not been increasing. If it were, the overall proportion of women in the industry would increase as the older generation of conductors (almost exclusively male) retires. We would expect, especially, to see a bulge in the “other conductors” category, since subsidiary conductorships tend to be stepping stones to music directorships. We do not see that.

• Second, the lack of a bulge in the “other conductors” category also casts some doubt on the claim that there are institutional barriers to women being chosen for music directorships. If there were such barriers, we would expect to see a bottleneck at the “other conductors” stage, with female conductors trapped in the purgatory of applying for music directorships they will never get. We do not see that either.

These bullet points are informed extrapolations, but our 14.6% estimate of the share of female conductors in the industry gives us a valuable tool for putting our hypothesis to a more rigorous test.

As the New York Times notes, guest conducting is one of (if not the) most important prerequisites for upward mobility in the conducting industry. Almost without fail, conductors guest conduct at an orchestra before that orchestra offers them a music director job. If they are not invited to guest conduct, the prospect that they will be offered a job becomes vanishingly small. If women were (as the Times and other sources suggest) being offered guest conducting positions at a lower rate than men proportional to their share of the conductor population, that would constitute a very real barrier, and indicate a discriminatory environment against women conductors.

Women as Guest Conductors with Major Orchestras

To test this, I did an analysis of guest conducted subscription concerts programmed on the 2022-23 seasons at the top-ten American orchestras by budget (according to this list). The lineup contains a variety of ensembles with a range of geographical locations, cultures, and reputations. If we make the fair assumption that the male and female conducting cohorts contain a roughly equivalent distribution of talent, then we would expect these orchestras to offer approximately 85% of their guest conducting opportunities to men and approximately 15% to women. If orchestras are indeed reluctant to invite women as guest conductors, we would expect that proportion to be lower than 15%. (N.B., I used my best judgment in deciding what constituted a “subscription” concert, as opposed to pops, children’s, silent movie, etc.)

Orchestras invite guest conductors for two major reasons—to expose local audiences (and musicians) to great maestri from other ensembles, and to build relationships with young up-and-coming members of the profession who they might one day consider for further work. Since the second group is more useful for measuring opportunity for conductors to advance in the profession, I did the analysis a second time, including only conductors aged 45 or younger.  

With the all-ages group, I did a Bayesian statistical analysis to determine the degree—assuming that conductors are 14.6% women and 85.4% men—to which administrators selecting guest conductors favor men over women or women over men.

I was somewhat skeptical of the assertion that men were favored over women as guest conductors when starting this analysis, but even I was surprised by the results. In the 2022-23 season, the surveyed orchestras invite a total of 166 guest conductors for subscription concerts. As you can see in the table above, out of the ten orchestras surveyed, seven favor female guests over male guests.

Some favor female guests only by a little, such as the Boston Symphony, where a woman conductor is 30% more likely to be invited than a man. But at several orchestras, the disparity is far starker. At the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a woman conductor is 260% likelier to be invited as a guest than a male conductor; at the Philadelphia Orchestra, 355%. Across the sample of ten orchestras, women conductors are 70% likelier to be invited as guests than men. And if we eliminate one outlier—the uber-conservative Cleveland Orchestra, which invited no women—that percentage rises to 93%.

Among guest conductors under age 45, the results are even more skewed. And for my assumption of the gender breakdown of under-45s, I even chose a more generous percentage of women conductors than 14.6%. Here’s why: Over the years since the League of American Orchestras survey was published in 2016, I have observed that there seems to be a slightly increased flow of young women conductors into the profession. (I noted, for instance, that women constituted 25% of the 64 finalists at the 2019-2021 iterations of three major competitions for young conductors [the Malko, Besançon, and Donatella Flick Competitions]. For what it’s worth, the Besançon Competition claimed that its applicant pool was also 25% female.) Figuring that the proportion of women conductors under 45 is therefore somewhere between 14.6% and 25% (with the younger part of that group skewing more female), I settled on 20% women.  

At the ten orchestras I surveyed, a total of 57 guest conductors in 2022-23 are younger than 45. Of these, 22 are women. As shown in the table above, this means that with an assumption of 20% female conductors below 45 in the industry, women under 45 are favored by 151% over their male colleagues. They are 2.5 times as likely as men to be invited to guest conduct. These numbers are so stark as to be almost unbelievable, but there they are.

Media outlets like those we quoted earlier continue to claim that women are struggling to get guest conducting gigs at major orchestras. By the evidence of the nation’s top ten orchestras just one year after that was written, that claim is absolutely false. If guest conducting at major orchestras once constituted a barrier for women, that barrier has been surmounted. We now find ourselves in an overcorrection phase, and not by a little: by a lot.

Some Objections

Several objections will likely be levelled at this analysis.

The first is that by excluding concerts conducted by music directors of the orchestras I studied, I am misrepresenting the gender balance of their concerts. Music directors conduct between a third and half of concerts, and nine out of the ten orchestras I studied are music directed by men. If I were to factor in an additional 100 or so concerts conducted 90% by men, my results would be considerably less dramatic.

To this, I say that the objection misses the point of the analysis, which is to examine opportunity for female conductors at top orchestras: to assess female conductors’ probability of becoming music directors in the future, for which guest conducting, not music directing, is the appropriate measure. (Though as an aside, I would add that since the proportion of women in the conducting profession is currently 15%, it would only take one more hire of a female music director, which the LA Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, or New York Philharmonic could easily accomplish in the next couple years, for women to become overrepresented among top-ten music directors.)

The second objection I anticipate is that I used only American conducting industry statistics, when many guest conductors come from Europe. Perhaps, the objector might suggest, Europe has more female conductors and the more female-heavy selection of guest conductors by U.S. orchestras simply reflects a more gender-diverse international talent pool.

They would be correct to point out that many guest conductors come from abroad. So do music directors. (The top-ten orchestras I evaluated earlier have not a single American-born music director among them.) But they would be absolutely incorrect to suggest that there are more female conductors in Europe than in the U.S.

While Europe has no universal orchestra organization like the League of American Orchestras, we can piece together a picture with data points from individual nations. In the U.K., women are estimated to comprise 6% of conductors. In France, they are estimated to comprise 3%. In the orchestra mecca of Germany, we find no quantitative measurement, but only the qualitative assessment that female conductors are “extremely scarce.” It’s a safe assumption that if we incorporated the proportion of female conductors in Europe into our analysis, our 14.6% estimate would go down, not up, making our results even starker.

The third objection I anticipate is the most substantive. A reader with knowledge of statistics might point out that the application of Bayes’ Theorem in this article assumes “IID conditions,” which means that both the male and female pools contain an even distribution of individuals as far as talent and other intangible factors.

I believe that we should make that assumption. But others might object that for some reason (perhaps the dispiriting effect of the lack of female “representation” on would-be young conductors), the elite younger women who make it to the top of the profession are simply twice as good as the elite young men who make it. Therefore, it’s only natural that they would be twice as likely to land guest conducting gigs.

But to any sentient concertgoer who has watched young conductors recently, this objection simply doesn’t pass the smell test. I ask readers to look at the actual conductors in front of them. Is Dalia Stasevska a better conductor today than Lahav Shani? Does she show more promise than he does? Is Lina González-Granados better than Rafael Payare? Does she show more promise than he does?

I readily grant that there are plenty of counterexamples to the two I just mentioned, but it is not difficult to establish that the elite corps of young female conductors currently on America’s podiums is not twice as good or twice as talented as the elite corps of young male conductors. If anything, they are close to evenly matched, except for the fact that the women are getting more gigs.

The Pipeline

Women conductors’ outsized success as guests, despite their tepid gains in representation in the industry at large, begs the question: How are so many women getting to this level?

The conventional media narrative tells us that just like in the upper reaches of the profession, the pipeline from conducting schools into the industry is a brutal place for female conductors. As Alsop puts it in a documentary released this year, “The old boys’ network has existed for centuries. We need to create the old girls’ network, so that we can really be there for each other and support each other.”

But Alsop may be a couple decades too late; the truth is that the water is far warmer for women than the media seem to think. Not only are the industry’s traditional opportunities for advancement wide open to women conductors, but there has developed over the last couple decades an entirely new cottage industry of conductor advancement programs open exclusively to women conductors.

Traditionally the transition from school to professional grade conducting has been mediated by a relatively small group of prestigious masterclasses, summer festivals, fellowships, and competitions in the U.S. and Europe. The traditional career-making summer festivals in the U.S. include the Aspen Music Festival, the Tanglewood Music Center, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, and the Chautauqua Institution (which offer a combined 20-or-so positions to young conductors each summer), plus a handful of similar programs in Europe. Top U.S. fellowships include the Bruno Walter Conductor Preview (administrated by the League of American Orchestras) and the Georg Solti Foundation Career Assistance Grant. Major competitions (all European) include the Malko (Danish), Besançon (French), and Donatella Flick (English), among others.

Women are doing just fine—and might even be overrepresented relative to their entry into the conducting field—at these programs. At the Chautauqua Institution, possibly America’s most prestigious summer fellowship for conducting students because it accepts only one student per year, women have won the fellowship three of the last four years. At the Georg Solti Foundation, women won three out of fifteen (20%) of spots in 2021, and one of those winners—Lina González Granados—also won the Solti Conducting Apprenticeship, which accords her an assistantship with Chicago Symphony music director Riccardo Muti. At the three conducting competitions I listed, out of 32 winners and runners-up over their last three iterations stretching back nearly a decade, 8 have been women—25%. Far from holding young women conductors back, these institutions are giving them a slight boost.

But this has not stopped organizations on both sides of the Atlantic over the last few years from creating a range of new career advancement opportunities exclusively for women conductors or—more ominously—closing traditionally co-ed opportunities to men.

The Dartington Summer School in Devon in the south of England has long been one of the preeminent summer teaching festivals in Western Europe. Its summer conducting course—currently taught by former English National Opera Music Director Sian Edwards—has trained several of the finest conductors in Europe and the U.S. In 2022, the festival announced that its conducting program would be offered this year in partnership with the Royal Philharmonic Society’s (RPS’s) Women Conductors Program. To fill the four slots in this year’s conducting course, Dartington would seek applications only from women. Alice Farnham, leader of the RPS Women Conductors Program, explained: “The gender ratio in the profession is still well under 10%, and this is a wonderful opportunity to help tip that balance. What better environment could there be for two weeks of focussed study than Dartington Summer School.”

On our side of the Atlantic, the Dallas Opera has for eight years played host to its own Hart Institute for Women Conductors, backed by several major non-profit foundations. The program takes the form of a two-week seminar each summer featuring four young women conductors. It offers direct networking with administrators from major opera companies, culminating in a showcase concert. In the words of this year’s Hart Institute advertisement, “this concert is the grand finale of an intensive two-week residency, which includes working with some of today’s most renowned maestri. Opera managers from all over the world will be there to scout the leaders of tomorrow!” Across the pond, Opera North in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England also recently announced a nine-week intensive conducting apprenticeship program only for women conductors.

In 2020, the Paris Mozart Orchestra and Philharmonie de Paris launched the first ever La Maestra conducting competition. This competition aims to emulate the existing major conducting competitions (which already proportionally represent women, as we have seen), with the one difference that it accepts only women. It aims to serve as a stepping stone into major conducting opportunities in the same way that the Malko or Besançon competitions do for the conductor population at large, and its track record has so far been quite good. La Maestra’s 2020 winner Rebecca Tong (also incidentally a winner of the Chautauqua summer conducting fellow position) has since secured opportunities with the Orchestra de Paris, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. She is also now represented by a major agency. That year’s third-place winner is the aforementioned Lina González-Granados.

And then there is the Taki Alsop Fellowship, which has offered 3-4 fellows each year personal mentorship and entrée to the industry from Marin Alsop herself. The list of fellows since the first fellowship was awarded in 2003 reads like a who’s-who of female conductors in the industry. Conductors on that list who have had guest conducting appearances with major American orchestras over the last two seasons include: Lina González-Granados, Ruth Reinhardt, Lidiya Yankovskaya, Karina Canellakis, Mei-Ann Chen, and Jeri Lynne Johnson.

At this point, knowing that the non-gender-discriminating conducting programs are already offering women opportunities at a rate proportional to their presence in the conductor population, it’s reasonable for us to ask whether these female-only opportunities are really necessary. It’s a question that needs answering quite urgently, because in the tiny world of conducting, offering some 20 slots each year of high-powered mentorship programs exclusively to women is not a thumb on the scale. It’s an anvil.

Explaining her motivation in starting the Taki Alsop fellowship, Alsop writes: “I can clearly see what is needed to assist emerging conductors in the pursuit of their dreams and want to make the road easier and more rewarding for them. I have never ascribed to the philosophy that, ‘It was tough for me so it will be tough for you.’ My philosophy is: ‘It was tough for me so that I could make it easier for you.’” There is no doubt that in the 1980s, Alsop did indeed face an uphill climb as a female conductor. But do today’s young female conductors face the same obstacles? Despite comprising far less than 50% of the conducting population, the evidence suggests they do not.

Where do we go from here?

The foregoing evidence leaves us with a puzzle.

On the one hand, we remain much less likely to see a female conductor in front of a major American orchestra than we are to see a male conductor. On the other, individual female conductors today have opportunities in the industry that are out of reach for their male colleagues, including hugely outsized opportunity to guest conduct with major orchestras.

Many claim to know why women have not chosen to join the conducting profession in the same numbers as men. Some (mostly behind closed doors) have argued that the skills and interests that motivate a young musician to conduct simply occur more frequently in men. I don’t think we know enough to say that. Others argue that it’s a matter of representation—that because female musicians see few female conductors on the podium as they come of age, they don’t view conducting as a role that is possible for them. While the discrimination that women once faced in the profession is mostly gone, the perception of it remains and continues to affect women’s choices. This leaves the small percentage of women who remain interested in joining the profession to reap the considerable spoils of doing so.

Most fair-minded individuals would likely agree that this “representation” argument has some merit, particularly when it comes to understanding why the media and larger culture’s perception of opportunity for women is so out of step with reality. Most fair-minded individuals would likely also agree that the orchestra field would be better off if we had a roughly equal proportion of male and female conductors, so that young men and young women alike would feel liberated to share their gifts with us on the podium.

But like so many things in this world, this is not a question of good against evil, but of reconciling competing goods—in this case, the good of female representation versus the goods of artistic quality and fairness to individual people. That’s why I did not choose to headline this article Do we need more female conductors? (We certainly do), but rather: How badly do we need more female conductors? As written, the title asks not whether having more female conductors is good, but what we are willing to give up to get more female conductors.

My contention is that we are already giving up far too much. I believe this for three main reasons:

• First, the current state of affairs—that of an anvil, not a thumb on the scale—is profoundly unfair to young male conductors. It’s unfair to such an extent that I fear that young male conductors will see the tables I’ve put together for this article and ask themselves: If I’m already in an impossible profession and only 25% as likely to get a job as a woman who’s just as talented as I am, what’s the point? They are perfectly reasonable to ask that question, and I hate to imagine the talent our industry will lose if they do. A large portion of male conducting talent at the moment is like an aqueduct thundering uselessly out into the sea, as orchestras fall over each other to catch the few drops they can get from a far smaller pipe.

• Second, the current state of affairs is insulting to young female conductors. I say this not only because the representation argument paints women as unable to persevere against the odds (in support of which I might quote the indomitable Donna Baton, who says that “If a woman wants to do something, she’ll do it whether she sees herself represented or not.”). I also say this because it will create a caste of women conductors who won La Maestra, received a Taki Alsop Fellowship, and then launched a career guest conducting at the New York and LA Philharmonics, and will always wonder how much of their success was due to skill, and how much due to being a woman. And to be sure, the music director search committees that consider hiring them in a later, more responsible era will wonder the same thing. This poses significant risks for the long-term future position of female conductors in the industry by promoting the perception that women cannot succeed without institutional assistance.

• And third is that the current state of affairs undermines the artistic quality of our orchestras. It is simple economics that when demand for something (in this case women conductors) exceeds supply, the value of that thing is artificially raised. That means that when music administrators try to address gender disparities by raising their percentage of female guest conductors to some arbitrary level way above women’s actual representation in the industry, orchestras end up programming conductors who are below their usual conducting standards. Genuinely qualified female conductors will have more work than they can handle, and less qualified ones will have work that they’re not yet ready for. That is exactly what I observed in the episode detailed in the introduction to this article, and several times thereafter, and it’s exactly what we saw in our analysis of guest conductors under 45. Last year, the New York Times published an opinion piece arguing that orchestras should diversify their season schedules (both in terms of race and gender), by giving more subscription concerts to their (more racially and gender diverse) assistant conductors. Unfortunately, some orchestras have already been taking this terrible advice. In the process, they have been giving worse leadership to their players, a worse musical product to their audiences, and worse long-term career prospects to all young conductors—whether held back or prematurely promoted by this practice.

So, what should orchestras do to support fairness and artistic integrity while still giving women every opportunity to succeed in the industry? The first step is exceedingly simple: stop giving preference to female conductors. As Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts once wrote, in that instance about race, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The same principle applies here. Orchestras in America should make it their policy to assign contract conductors solely based on merit. If they need to check to see whether or not they are exhibiting bias, they should compare their results to the League’s 15% gender balance, or to whatever the numbers are in the future. Over the course of a few seasons, orchestras’ guest hiring should average out to within five-or-so percentage points of the actual industry gender breakdown.

Second, orchestra administrators should reverse course on how they describe industry conditions for female conductors. Rather than telling female conductors that their own orchestras impose barriers to their career advancement, they should celebrate the outstanding progress that has been made in surmounting centuries of prejudice. Pointing to the gender balance of their season schedules, administrators should proudly declare that they do not discriminate on the basis of gender. We’d love to have a 50/50 split between men and women, administrators should say to aspiring female conductors, but first, you have to give us your talent. Come join us!

The facts have changed more than enough for orchestras to change their narrative. From now on, they should tell women not that they have been historically excluded from conducting, but that they were once excluded from conducting, but are not anymore. If they change their language to reflect reality, rather than the imperatives of social justice ideology, maybe one day they will actually achieve the equal representation they so earnestly seek.

Readers can find the season schedules I scrubbed for data at the following links.

NY Philharmonic

LA Philharmonic

Boston Symphony

SF Symphony

Chicago Symphony

Cleveland Orchestra

Philadelphia Orchestra

Cincinnati Symphony

Atlanta Symphony

National Symphony