Study Reveals Stark Gender Gap in Jazz Education
A new report from the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice and Lara Pellegrinelli studies the gender gap in jazz education.
Kelly Davidson
The Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice has released the results of its first-ever study, “Jazz Counts: Measuring the Jazz Faculty Gender Gap in Higher Education,” in collaboration with researcher Lara Pellegrinelli.
Drawing from the websites of over 200 educational institutions, Jazz Counts reveals that male-identified jazz educators outnumber their female-identified counterparts by a factor of six. Women are underrepresented across all faculty ranks, administrative roles, popular jazz instruments, and in academic areas that include music history, theory, and composition. The research design and original dataset upon which the research is based was created by Pellegrinelli in collaboration with students at the New School in New York City.
“‘Jazz Counts: Measuring the Jazz Faculty Gender Gap in Higher Education’ is an important piece of research that informs a key issue in the world of jazz education—gender representation,” said Pellegrinelli. “Until now, there has been almost no statistical data that allows us to measure the participation of female-identified artists in jazz. I am proud to present the first-ever study examining this topic and am grateful to the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice for making its publication possible. I hope the leadership at institutions of higher learning will use the report to help create greater equity in the field.”
The study found that, out of 3,014 jazz educators representing 222 educational institutions across 44 US states and the District of Columbia, only 15 percent were identified as female, with eight percent of jazz instrumental faculty identified as female. Among those female-identified jazz faculty members, almost half (49 percent) are vocalists.
At schools with more than 30 jazz faculty members, the representation of female-identified educators ranges between six and 32 percent; 35 percent of schools employ no female-identified faculty members at all. Upon analyzing jazz department websites, the researchers did not encounter any jazz educators who identified as nonbinary. The data was collected during the 2021–2022 academic year.
Lara Pellegrinelli
The majority of female-identified faculty members serve in adjunct positions. These roles are best represented as assistant professors (18 percent) and their numbers decrease in tenured positions, such as associate professor (17 percent) and professor (10 percent). Women occupy 16 percent of administrative positions, and only six percent are directors of jazz programs in more than 100 of the schools represented in the Jazz Counts study.
In the classroom, female-identified faculty are slightly more likely to teach performance than academic subjects. Women comprise less than 13 percent of those teaching music history and appreciation, composition and arranging, and theory, while 13 percent teach courses that explicitly address improvisation.
The statistics presented in the Jazz Counts study offer jazz scholars a material foundation for the ongoing conversations around gender justice while providing a model for further studies in the emerging field of data humanities. The research is intended to help administrators understand how gender impacts the production and reproduction of knowledge in jazz education, a professional area critical to halting women’s erasure and disrupting systemic inequalities.
The data suggest a need to address departmental hiring practices, the use of adjunct and part-time labor, and decision-making around course assignments in music departments. The institute intends for this study to also serve as a reference for high school educators and their students, who may take faculty-gender balance into consideration when deciding where to continue their jazz studies.
“Jazz Counts serves a critical role for those teaching, performing, and passing the genre on to the next generation of students,” said Terri Lyne Carrington, founder and artistic director of the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. “We are so grateful to have partnered with Lara Pellegrinelli and her students, who have done the legwork to determine obstacles women are facing across jazz positions in higher education. We hope that the study will drive action to address the stark inequalities we currently see and help to create a more inclusive jazz education community.”
