Gender and the tertiary music curriculum in Australia

The paper argues that women's music continues to be excluded in tertiary music curricula, translating into the virtual absence of their music on concert platforms. Data from previous studies and a recent survey of six tertiary music institutions in Australia supports this claim. The paper also draws on a pilot study which showed that tertiary music students were unable to tell the difference between women’s and men’s music in a blind listening task and judged women’s music to be more innovative than the men’s. In view of these findings, tertiary music education is confronted with the challenge to include more women’s classical music from all historical periods and from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in theoretical subjects of the curricula. It is argued that when music students become familiar with women’s music through their training they will go on to reproduce this music in their later careers as educators, arts administrators and concert-goers. The long term result of positive discrimination for women's music would be a more equitable distribution of music according to gender in concert hall music programs