PARIS — Overcome with emotion, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif left the ring in tears after a resounding victory this weekend. Khelif has faced days of hateful comments and false accusations about her gender following her first fight against an Italian opponent who quit seconds into their bout. “It’s because she’s African, because she’s Algerian,” 38-year-old Algerian fan Adel Mohammed said Saturday, when Khelif clinched an Olympic medal.
“These comments are coming from white people ...
it’s a kind of racism.” Female athletes of color have historically faced disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination when it comes to sex testing and false accusations that they are male or transgender, historians and anthropologists say. Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting, who won her bout Sunday after similar abuse and questions about her gender, are the latest examples of women of color who have found themselves caught in the contentious debate around gender regulations and perceptions in sports.
More women from the Global South or developing countries are affected by sex testing in sports, said Payoshni Mitra, director of the Center for Sport and Human Rights, a human rights organization based in Switzerland. She has worked with dozens of female athletes across Asia and Africa to fight sex testing practices. “Sport is very Eurocentric — the approach is not necessarily global,” Mitra said.
“We need to accept women in all their diversity. And we are not seeing that at this point.” Mitra and other advocates and anthropologists note that international sporting federations don’t tend to promote an understanding of diversity in sex and gender identity and that gender tests have often targeted female athletes of color who don’t conform to typically Western, white ideals of femininity.
In 2009, after her 800-meter victory in the world championships, South African runner Caster Semanya was sidelined for 11 months because of track and field rules about hormone levels. She has spent years in her legal battle against requirements for her to suppress her natural testosterone to compete. Semenya was identified as female at birth, raised as a girl and has been legally identified as female her entire life.
She has one of a number of conditions known as differences in sex development, or DSDs, which cause naturally high testosterone. World Athletics, track and field's governing body, said Semenya’s testosterone levels give her an athletic advantage comparable to a man competing in women’s events and that rules are needed to address that. Critics of the rules — which were put in place in 2011 and have tightened over the years — have considered naturally high testosterone levels to be a genetic gift, comparing it to a basketball player’s height or a swimmer’s long arms.
“Nobody was disqualifying Michael Phelps for having particular biological features that allowed him to excel in swimming," said medical anthropologist Danyal Kade Doyle Griffiths, an adjunct professor with the City University of New York. Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting, left, fights Bulgaria's Svetlana Staneva in their women's 57 kg quarterfinal boxing match at the 2024 Summer Olympics on Sunday in Paris. Indian sprinter Dutee Chand also faced a swarm of scrutiny and was dropped from the 2014 Commonwealth Games after reports of elevated testosterone.
She underwent rounds of testing and ultimately took the international track federation to court, challenging rules that enforced a limit on female athletes’ naturally occurring testosterone levels. Regardless of differences in sex or hormones, women of color — and Black women in particular — have often been subjected to stereotypes that portray them as more masculine. Dehumanization and objectification stretches back to chattel slavery, when enslaved Black women were valued for auction based on their physical appearances and skills that were seen as more masculine or more feminine.
Conspiracy theories and misinformation have spread online around tennis superstar Serena Williams, falsely alleging that she was born a man. In 2017, she wrote an open letter to her mother, thanking her for being a role model in facing people who were “too ignorant to understand the power of a Black woman.” Basketball star Brittney Griner also has faced similar false accusations amid scrutiny over Black women and their bodies that is rooted in historical racism: They are often perceived as not feminine enough, too muscular, intimidating or masculine.
“These examples strike me as particular cases where racism and transphobia and intersex phobia are kind of inseparable,” Griffiths said. “It ties back to a much longer history of the way that race is gendered, in which Black women are taken to be more masculine compared to white women." The definition of womanhood “is often reliant upon Westernized notions of white femininity or standards of white beauty," said Cheryl Cooky, professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Purdue University.
If a female athlete doesn't fit into those white, Westernized standards, "they’re subject to these questions and these accusations.” In Khelif’s case, the banned International Boxing Association disqualified her from the 2023 world championships after it claimed that she failed unspecified eligibility tests for the women’s boxing competition, citing elevated levels of testosterone. The Russian-dominated body — which has faced years of clashes with the International Olympic Committee — has refused to provide any information about the tests.
“The whole process is flawed,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said Sunday. “From the conception of the test, to how the test was shared with us, to how the tests have become public, is so flawed that it’s impossible to engage with it.” Adams previously said Khelif “was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport.
” The Olympic body released a 10-principle approach on gender and sex inclusion in 2021 that recognized the need for a “safe, harassment-free environment” honoring athletes' identities while ensuring competitions are fair. Advocates like Mitra hopes those are taken seriously. Meanwhile, Algerians have rallied behind Khelif, defending her against hateful comments.
Algerian athlete Zahra Tatar, competing in hammer throwing, called Khelif’s fight “beautiful” and said “we all hope she gets the gold medal.” Skoove and Data Pulse teamed up again to better understand the extent of women's exclusion and why it's happening. After combing through studies, reports, surveys, and government statistics on the subject, we found that gender disparities exist throughout the music industry, from songwriting and production to performances and accolades.
Because some sources used male/female designations while others used men/women, we used both designations. Here are some of the top insights. Misogyny, homophobia, and sexism are rampant in the music industry.
Don't take it from us. Take it from artists — both newbies and the superstars — who experience it. "The music industry can be, as you know, a bit homophobic, a bit sexist at times," said Sam Smith, a nonbinary singer and songwriter, when speaking on SiriusXM in 2019.
"So being feminine like this in the way that I move and dance and am is—it feels quite scary at times." "I've politely walked out of sessions before," said Ariana Grande in an interview with Billboard. "And then I sit down and comp my own vocals and can produce my own session, and they're like 'Oh, I didn't know you could do that.
' I'm like, 'Believe it or not, there are plenty of tiny women that can do this.'" In 2019, the Berklee College of Music published a comprehensive survey of U.S.
music professionals from both the creative side of the industry (performers, songwriters, and producers), and business side (managers, administrators, and artist developers). Among the nearly 2,000 women respondents, more than three-quarters had experienced gender bias in the music industry, and just over half felt their gender had affected their job prospects. The creative professionals were more likely than the business professionals to say gender impacted their jobs.
In particular, 70% of producers and recorders, 68% of performers, and 57% of music creators and songwriters experienced gender bias that affected their employment. This bias translates to major gender disparities across the industry. According to the U.
S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 1 in 4 musicians and singers in the country are women. This alarming level of underrepresentation reaffirms the findings from our prior Spotify analysis and clearly attests to the barriers women face in gaining visibility and opportunities in the field.
As songwriters, Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift are the only women who have earned at least 20 credits on the year-end Billboard Hot 100 charts since 2012. Nine male songwriters have accomplished the same, including three men who have more than 30. Minaj hasn't been shy about her experience with sexism and her frustrations with trying to get recognition and credit as a woman artist.
"I'd have to wear some baggy pants n timbs for men to openly give props," she griped on Twitter in 2017, along with a series of tweets about double standards. Music creation relies heavily on technical talent, such as producers and engineers. They make sure the singers and musicians are showcased at their best during recording and mixing.
Women, unfortunately, are rarely part of that key process. In 2023, " Fix The Mix " became the first major study of gender representation across audio production and engineering personnel. The report, a collaboration between the nonprofit We Are Moving The Needle and music credits database Jaxsta, analyzed 3,785 technical credits on the top-50 songs of 14 genres according to streaming data from Apple Music and Spotify.
In total, the analysis encompassed 634 individual songs (some straddled multiple genres). The study concluded that, out of 1,260 total music producers, only 65 were women and nonbinary people (5%). The numbers were similarly dismal for engineers — only 46 out of 1,480 (3%).
In Skoove's prior gender analysis of top musical artists, we found that female representation varied by genre . Latin, hip hop, and rap have extremely low rates of women artists, for example, while pop music has the most female representation, at 38%. Similarly, the Fix The Mix report found that gender imbalances among music technicians differed by genre.
As the following chart shows, women received the most credits in the electronic and folk/Americana genres, but still only accounted for 11% of those credits. Of the 14 genres in the analysis, metal had the worst inclusion record — it was completely dominated by male producers and engineers. The study went further, breaking out gender gaps by label.
The analysis looked at the top-10 songs across five streaming services and across 14 genres. The results were sobering. Songs distributed by Universal Music Group, which accounts for 40% of the music in the dataset, had only a small fraction (4%) of women and nonbinary technicians credited.
Sony and Warner, each with about 20% of the songs in the database, had 6% and 3%, respectively. The report's authors noted that big music companies can make policy changes that could ripple through the industry. "Hiring practices have continued to reinforce skewed gender visibility trends," they explained.
"Structures of power are hesitant to shift support from those that have historically benefitted the most from them." Women across the industry have repeatedly expressed frustration with the expectations their peers in the industry, their audiences, and the media set for them. "Women in music are allowed to be singer songwriters singing about their boyfriends," wrote Björk on Facebook several years ago.
"If they change the subject matter to atoms, galaxies, activism, nerdy math beat editing or anything else other than being performers singing about their loved ones they get criticized." Other women have talked openly about being sexualized and objectified. In an interview with Variety, in late 2023, Billie Eilish said people scrutinize what she looks like and how she dresses.
"Nobody ever says a thing about men's bodies," she said. "If you're muscular, cool. If you're not, cool.
If you're rail thin, cool. If you have a dad bod, cool. If you're pudgy, love it!" Lady Gaga shared a similar sentiment when she spoke with Glamour in 2017: "As much as we all love the fashion and the makeup and the glamour, this isn't a beauty pageant.
It's about the heart and the drive and the work." From their wardrobes to their lyrics, women feel pressure to fit a certain mold to get noticed. It's a systemic problem driven by exploitation and rejection that permeates the industry — and it's keeping women from getting the opportunities they deserve.
For instance, in 2023, only 30% of acts at electronic music festivals worldwide were female, and 3.3% were nonbinary, according to a report from female:pressure, a network and data hub for underrepresented members of the electronic music scene. While this is an improvement over the last decade (only 9.
2% of acts were female in 2012), there's a long road ahead. Perhaps the all-female band Camp Cope put it best in their song "The Opener": It's another man telling us we can't fill up the room It's another man telling us to book a smaller venue Nah, hey, come on girls, we're only thinking about you Now look how far we've come not listening to you Yeah, just get a female opener, that'll fill the quota The music industry, despite its progressive veneer, continues to lag in gender equality, heavily favoring men in both visibility and opportunity. This imbalance is a systemic issue, rooted in years of cultural and structural biases.
Still, there are signs that things are changing. In recent years, there's been a slight, yet promising, increase in the visibility of female artists and professionals. Initiatives and organizations like Keychange and Women in Music (among many others) are pushing the industry to do better by holding stakeholders accountable for the disparity and advocating for gender balance at festivals and in boardrooms.
The growing awareness of the problem is starting to pay off; more women were on the Billboard Hot 100 charts than ever before in 2023. "We're doing great, we're making great strides and I'm proud to be a woman in this business," said Dolly Parton as she arrived at the Grammy Awards ceremony in 2019. But more has to be done to not lose this momentum and ensure that women feel welcomed and supported across the industry.
Many of the reports cited in this article contain recommendations for change. But one of the most frequent suggestions is to put women and nonbinary people in leadership and decision-making roles within the industry. As the U.
K. Parliament report put it, "The lack of women in positions of authority sets the culture and influences decisions for the rest of the profession and can have a direct impact on women's career opportunities and progression." In an industry that thrives on creativity, the inclusion of diverse voices is not just fair.
It's also beneficial, enriching the music industry with untapped perspectives and talents. This story originally appeared on Skoove , was produced by DataPulse and was reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media. Get local news delivered to your inbox!.
