Women have long been underrepresented in the music industry, but if Sunday's 61st Grammy Awards are any indication, that may be about to change.
Female artists went home with a number of other top awards, including Best New Artist (Dua Lipa), Best Pop Vocal Album (Ariana Grande) and Best Pop Solo Performance (Lady Gaga). Cardi B made history as the first solo female rapper to win Rap Album of the Year for "Invasion of Privacy," her debut album.
While the majority of the nominees at last night's award show were still male, five of the eight nominees for Album of the Year were female, and four of eight nominees for Record of the Year were either female or had at least one female as a member of a duo or group. These two awards went home to Kacey Musgraves and Childish Gambino, respectively.
Last year's Grammy Awards show faced public backlash after all but one of the major awards were given to male artists. In response to criticism, the Grammy's President, Neil Portnow, stated in an interview with Variety that women needed to "step up." Following these incidents, the social media hashtag #GrammysSoMale quickly went viral.
According to a report from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, in the past seven years, around ten percent of Grammy nominees have been female. This year, there was a significant jump in the percentage of female nominees, which had remained fairly stagnant from 2015-2018, as stated in the report.
Richard McIlvery, who is a member of the Grammy Foundation Recording Academy that elects the winners, said that while the Recording Academy is "overwhelmingly supportive of women," the reason they have not been as successful as men at the Grammys is due to a "ratio problem."
"There's more males in the business, so if you look at the percentage of very good female artists and very good male artists, there's going to be tons more male artists [winning], because there's tons more males," McIlvery said.
For McIlvery, female artists' success is dependent on the size of their population.
"Men are not more talented than women, by any means, there's just more of them," he said. "Women have not been given a chance [to win]. And I think that the more women who do it, the more we're gonna see."