| Abstract: |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Frédéric Chopin are household
names, but few will recognize Francesca Caccini, Elisabeth Lutyens or Amy M.
Beach, who are among the top-10 female composers of all time. Why are female
composers overshadowed by their male counterparts? Using novel data on over
17, 000 composers who lived from the sixth to the twentieth centuries, we
conduct the first quantitative exploration of the gender gap among classical
composers. We use the length of a composer's biographical entry in Grove Music
Online to measure composer prominence, and shed light on the determinants of
the gender gap with a focus on the development of composers' human capital
through families, teachers, and institutionalized music education. The
evidence suggests that parental musical background matters for composers'
prominence, that the effects of teachers vary by the gender of the composer
but the effects of parents do not, and while musician mothers and female
teachers are important, they do not narrow the gender gap in composer
prominence. We also find that the institutionalization of music education in
conservatories increases the relative prominence of female composers. |