bigideas

I promised myself I wouldn’t cover another of these slow-news-day stories about gender differences for a while, but this one is a bit different in that it’s not coming from a sociobiologist’s perspective and actually appears to be a decent piece of research.

The story springs from Prof Susan Hallam’s research into gender differences between choice of musical instruments among schoolchildren. The story is that girls choose the flute or harp far more often than boys do, and boys favour guitar, brass instruments and drums.

First, some bibliographic business. The research in question appears to be the DFES publication, Survey of Local Authority Music Services 2005, which was published on 7 December 2005 and so presumably isn’t actually “news” unless you’re a geologist. The relevant part is about two pages of text and a couple of tables of data in a 101-page document. The equivalent survey for 2007 was scheduled to be completed on 30 August but is not yet published (this link may show it when it is). The Press Association, which most of the UK newspapers and broadcasters seem to have drawn on, doesn’t cite a source but quotes directly from this publication, so I’ll take it that this is indeed the source for the story. As an aside, it continues to astonish me that no major news source I’m aware of puts links to the research on its web site when it covers stuff like this.

One can speculate about whether girls like high-pitched instruments because high voices are considered feminine, whereas boys like the louder, more boisterous sounds of the brass instruments. The trombone, for instance, is favoured by boys according to the study and is one of the few low-pitched wind instruments offered regularly to high-school children. Speaking as someone who has briefly messed about with a contrabass clarinet (no, that’s not me), I can tell you there’s something weirdly satisfying about playing a wind instrument that’s much lower in pitch than your own voice.

Many journalists are summarising this by saying that “girls don’t choose brass or percussion” but that’s not quite what it says; for example,

The least gendered instruments were African drumming, cornet, French horn, saxophone and tenor horn.

I suspect there are almost as many cultural factors at work here as there are instruments, and simplifying down to one — say, a correlation between instrument pitch and stereotypically desirable voice range — is foolhardy. 62% of bassoon students were girls; the bassoon is bass instrument, and can lead to contrabassoon playing as cannabis can lead to the use of crack cocaine.

Here are a couple of other things to stir into the explanatory mix. First, the tendency for brass players to be boys (which is not, you will note, a tendency for boys to be brass players). Brass instruments have a long history in military and other marching bands. Trumpets were introduced into the orchestra as novelty effects in the very late eighteenth century, and were not always available even in Beethoven’s day; other members of the brass family were added over the course of the century as the orchestra expanded and its role in large-scale public concerts developed. So they’re a relative newcomer to the “classical music” world.

In their early role in classical music they remained associated primarily with two activities that are associated with boys: warfare and hunting. And in the twentieth century they were popular among jazz musicians, many of whom learned their instruments either in the US army or in community brass bands (including the famous New Orleans marching bands).

As a consequence, funk, soul and pop bands often had brass sections and rarely have woodwind sections. This brings me to my second observation, which is that many of the most male-dominated instruments such as guitar, bass guitar, drum kit, trumpet and trombone are also “band” instruments, and boys and encouraged far more to be involved with forming bands playing music of their own choice from outside the classical tradition. Bassoon skills don’t open many doors in that world, but being a trombone player might, and electric guitar or drum kit are better still.

There are also some physical factors — or in some cases perceived factors — that might affect children’s choices based on stereotypical gender roles. Wonderfully, the Times asks why little girls don’t play the tuba which, as everyone knows, is a large instrument that requires powerful lungs. On the other hand, I’m sure this is a matter of perception more than brute fact: the flute, clarinet and oboe appear delicate but require physical strength, muscular control and stamina; ballet could be described in the same way, and suffers from the same gender bias.

So it seems to me that there are a lot of reasons why boys and girls tend on average to choose different instruments. It also seems that they’re likely to be interesting — all of the ideas I mentioned could be significantly fleshed-out, and there must be plenty more. But what’s most telling to me is that, within certain constraints, children choose the instruments they learn and are acting-out stereotypes they’ve already bought into, with the help, in some cases, of the adults who advise them.