National estimates of male and female enrolment in American high school choirs, bands and orchestras

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to estimate, at a national level and over time, the participation rates of males and females among those students who formally enrol in American high school music ensembles. Ten cohorts of nationally representative samples of students from 1982 and 2009 were analysed using data from High School Transcript Studies conducted by the National Centre for Education Statistics. Results of the present study indicated that, for the time period studied, females were significantly overrepresented in all three traditional US high school music ensemble areas: choir, band and orchestra. As might be expected, choral music enrolment was the most consistently imbalanced by gender across the cohorts, with roughly 70% female and 30% male enrolment in each of the cohorts under study. The results of this study suggest that the US music education emphasis on ensemble music making promotes gender sorting of females into music at the high school level. This finding raises questions about the dominance of males among the ranks of working instrumental music educators and the efficacy of the profession's attempts to recruit more males into choral singing.

Who Enrolls in High School Music? A National Profile of U.S. Students, 2009–2013

“…Reaffirming the results of prior research, we find that females were overrepresented in music ensembles overall, with the birth-assigned sex imbalance most pronounced in choir and orchestra. The overrepresentation of female students in choir is not particularly surprising, and the 70%/30% split we find here is strikingly consistent to a prior study examining choral music enrollment across 10 nationally representative cohorts spanning three decades (Elpus, 2015). Given that we found no significant imbalance between males and females in band for this cohort, the imbalance among choir and orchestra students drives the association between sex and overall music ensemble enrollment for the class of 2013.…”

“…In our earlier work (Elpus & Abril, 2011), we found that the overall representation of females was higher (61.1%) than that of males in ensemble courses, a figure strikingly similar to one reported 30 years earlier, when ensemble students were 61.4% female (Stewart, 1991). This was confirmed in a subsequent study that reported that females were overrepresented in bands and orchestras but to a much smaller degree than choral ensembles, where males were significantly underrepresented by more than a 2:1 ratio (Elpus, 2015). In contrast, female instrumental students were found to be less likely to participate in and more likely to withdraw from high school jazz ensembles than their male counterparts (McKeage, 2004).…”

Music education promotes lifelong engagement with the arts

“…Corroborating Borgonovi’s assertion about the unequal distribution of music and arts education in the U.S., recent research in American music education has suggested that there are many socioeconomic and demographic differences between the population of students who elect nonmandated music education and those who do not (Elpus, 2013, 2014, 2015; Elpus & Abril, 2011; Fitzpatrick, 2006; Kinney, 2008). Synthesized, this line of research suggests that music students in the United States are more likely to be female, more likely to be White (and, commensurately, less likely to report Hispanic or Latino origin), more likely to come from the highest socioeconomic status quartile, more likely to speak English as a native language, more likely to have parents with advanced educational attainment, and more likely to demonstrate higher academic achievement prior to the age at which their music study commences than are students who do not pursue elective music study in schools.…”

Recruiting and Retaining Black and Latinx Students in String Orchestra Programs

“…Similarly, many high school performing ensembles, particularly string orchestras, reflect the same underrepresentation (DeLorenzo 2012). According to previous research, the overwhelming majority of students who participate in American string orchestra programs, particularly at the secondary level, are white, of high-socioeconomic status, and reside in suburban areas (Elpus 2015; Smith, 1997; Smith, Mick, and Alexander, 2018). Blacks make up 11 percent of school orchestras, while Latinx make up 15 percent (Smith, Mick, and Alexander, 2018).…”