ABSTRACT
This chapter explores why women are under-represented in classical music composition. There is the obvious point that what sociologists call 'Matthew effects' predominate the classical music canon was almost completely established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when women had almost no access to the profession. Even were women to dominate new music, concert programmes would show only a marginal improvement in the gender ratio. The chapter presents the relevant literature, and explores how the social networks of female composers differ from those of male composers on a number of key measures. It examines how connectedness, measured by degree centrality, affects composer's output, using both a measure of symbolic success and a measure of commercial success. It uses both a 'symbolic' measure of success relating to esteem of the music world, and a 'commercial' measure of success, namely the number of recordings on which each composer is featured in the Amazon classical music catalogue.
