A piece in The Guardian by Fiona Sinclair, CEO of the Leeds international piano competition. An extract:
“Among members of the World Federation of International Music Competitions, men won 82% of the most recent 40 major piano competitions, and more than a third of these had all-male finals. The violin world reveals a striking contrast, where women claim 75% of first prizes.”
You will be shocked to learn Ms Sinclair has nothing to say about the scandalous violin gender gap.
So, what might explain these gender gaps? Obvious explanations include:
- More men then women play the piano at the highest level, more women than men play the violin at a high level.
- In an orchestra there is seldom more than one musician playing the piano at any given time. So the pianist’s responsibility for always hitting the right notes is a heavy one. This isn’t true for violinists, who generally play within a large number of violinists – the collective noun is a “coven” – so can make plenty of mistakes without anyone noticing. This large number is a very old job creation scheme for women, as all but one of them could be replaced with a microphone. Plus women like to gossip with other women, so a coven of violinists is an attractive prospect for them.
- Two aspects of the physical superiority of men over women have a bearing on the matter. Women can’t cover the entire width of the keyboard with their shorter arms, and being weaker than men, are more inclined to carry their violins from concert to concert, rather than their pianos.
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Justice for Men & Boys 
Yet another whining, discontented, unhappy and shrewish female! She cannot accept that men and women are different. Men are better pianists plain and simple! This article is honestly rather laughable. Men are better musicians in general and that is just a fact! As a musician myself I just laugh at crap like this article!
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Thanks, good points. I recommend a book by an American author, Dick Masterson, “Men Are Better Than Women”.
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I am a piano teacher. If you want to make a career as a soloist you dont have to be good you have to be “Brilliant ” If you want to be a piano teacher you have to be good and hard working,, When I go on teachers courses 80% of the participants are female Some years ago I applied for a job teaching class music (singing etc )at a private school and was told by the headmistress “We want to appoint a woman ” So yes there is sexism in the music industry but not the sort that the Guardian is interested in
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Thanks John, interesting.
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Yes its bizarre isn’t it. In her own piece she gives the evidence that refutes her thesis right at the start. I’m sure a survey of classical music competitions would find all sorts of different “gender gaps”. As it turns out men and women have different preferences and different reach, carrying capacity or even lung capacity.
Interestingly research over decades suggests that “blind” listening is unlikely to result in women improving their scores relative to men. Wherever blind marking etc. is introduced(where the sex of the candidate is unknown to the assessor/marker/judge) females experience a drop. Because of the well documented tendency to be generous to females (“benign sexism”) a phenomenon that both male and female teachers exhibit. This phenomenon was very well shown in comparing the exam results prior to covid and the use of “teacher assessment” to replace examinations. Females disproportionately benefitted from “grade inflation”, and subsequently there was a lot of rumbling about this falling back to a smaller “gap” (though still in females favour) once examinations returned. Certainly in OECD countries (where this has been extensively researched) if you want to get higher achievement for females the evidence is that you need to make sure the judges know who the female candidates are! And then a deep cultural wish to be generous to females will boost their chances!
Given all this evidence it seems likely that the “gap” in Violin competitions has a bit more to do with sexism (of the supposedly “benign” variety) than the reverse gap in Piano.
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