Women dominate 2024 Grammy nominations in major categories — but are unrepresented behind the scenes

Women represent the majority of next year’s Grammy nominees for the “big four” awards, but are again absent on the list of nominations for Producer or Songwriter of the Year.

The Recording Academy announced Friday the full list of nominees for the 2024 Grammy Awards, which will take place on February 4 in Los Angeles. Women are included in seven of the eight nominations for the Album, Record and Song of the Year awards, as well as five of the eight nominations for Best New Artist, according to the Grammy website.

Despite these strides in highly contested awards, zero women are nominated for Producer of the Year or Songwriter of the Year, which also fall under the “General Field” category.

Icesha Sanders, a second year student studying occupational therapy and a new member of the GRAMMY U mentorship program, said she “wasn’t surprised” by this gap in gender representation.

“With a bunch of the really huge labels in the music industry, the majority of the songwriters and producers who are under them are male,” Sanders said. “It’s something that they should definitely take more steps to scout out the artists who are not male, who are breaking boundaries in the industry.”

Kevin Allen, a fourth year student studying classical voice and opera, said that the lack of representation of women in the Producer and Songwriter of the Year nominations was “disheartening.”

“I know that a lot of women are in the room when it comes to songwriting,” Allen said. “It just feels really disingenuous to the art form for all the nominees to be mainly men that I’ve never heard of.”

The lack of representation of women in the Producer and Songwriter of the Year awards is not new to the 2024 nominations. The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which researches diversity and inclusion in entertainment, found that women only made up 1.7% of nominees for Producer of the Year between 2013 and 2023. In 2022, 2023 and now 2024, not a single woman producer received a nomination for the award.

The 2024 Grammy nominations, however, are noted for breaking records in the representation of women in the overall nominations, especially the “big four” awards — Album, Record and Song of the Year, and Best New Artist. In 2023, women made up 15.1% of Record of the Year nominees, 12.2% of Album of the Year nominees, 33.3% of Song of the Year nominees and 50% of Best New Artist nominees, according to the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.

Sanders noted nominees such as SZA, Victoria Monet, Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift, who were all nominated for Record of the Year.

“Seeing not just women but Black women being recognized … made me extremely happy,” she said. “I know the Grammys usually fall short when it comes to that. It seems like they’re taking steps in the right direction to take more notice of the amount of great music in the industry right now.”

Allen reflected a similar sentiment. He said he was “so glad” that Laufey, a Chinese-icelandic jazz pop singer, got nominated for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.

“I think that that’s really good Asian representation being shown up there, as well as Icelandic representation and also just a different genre of music that most people in the popular mainstream don’t often listen to,” they said. “So I think that kind of representation, putting that music on a pedestal so it can be heard more is super, super helpful.”

The announcement of the 2024 Grammy nominations came two days after a woman filed a lawsuit against former Grammy Awards CEO Neil Portnow, alleging that he sexually assaulted her in 2018. The woman also filed against the Recording Academy for negligence, per the Associated Press.

Portnow was previously under fire in 2018 for telling reporters that women in music need to “step up” after being asked about the gender representation of that year’s Grammy Awards ceremony, where only one woman won a solo Grammy during the televised portion, according to the New York Times.