Community Think Tank

A key part of my research and project involves considering Alternative Radio as a platform. It was important here to discuss the amount of female representation that can be found within both presentation and chosen playlists for the radio stations. To gather this information, I decided to focus on rock and indie based station Radio X. 

 

In total, Radio X has a percentage of 39% female listenership - a statistic that is available on their website. On this topic, the station describes itself as "slightly favoured by men." However, when researching the gender difference between female and male presenters, the difference is far more than slight. Over the space of a week, the station holds 56 radio slots, each lasting 3 hours. In that time, only 15 hours of radio are presented by Issy Panayis - the only woman who broadcasts on the station, and who does so between 1am and 4am on a week day. Alarmingly, there is no radio presented by a woman between 4am on a Friday until 1am on a Monday. The entire weekend of radio on the station is dominated by men. To produce radio in correlation to the amount of woman-lead radio equal to the 39% of female listeners, the station would need to include 65 hours of broadcasting presented by a woman. Somehow, those 5 slots a week fall short of expectation. 

 

I also conducted a study of a 3 hour section of Radio X broadcasting, in order to disclose how often female artists and musicians were featured as a part of their playlist. 

A full list of these artists can be found at https://anotherfemalefrontedband.tumblr.com/post/173700903920/representation-on-radio-x-a-study-of-3-hours 

Over the course of a 3 hour period, only one female artist - Florence & The Machine -  featured on the rotating playlist. 39 artists were played, yet only one of them included a female musician. Even more disconcerting was the fact that some artists were actually played more than once. Both The Killers and Stereophonics clocked up double the amount of radio play than any single female. Dave Grohl (of Nirvana and Foo Fighters) also gained triple the amount of exposure than any woman on the show. 

 

I have long felt that there was a significant disparity in the amount of women to men on the station, however I had not expected the contrast to be quite so significant. I also previously held the opinion that radio was better for artists, and easier to access than online streaming services such as Spotify and Youtube. However, if you want to listen to music made by, or presented by women, then you've probably gone to the right place - radio really is a one woman show.