Why are there so few female pipers ?

[Black Rose]

Wow, I can't believe I missed out on this thread all day long.

Rory, what's the complete title and publication date of Williams' book?

20:1 sounds a bit high to me these days, but I think it really depends where you are looking:
- I went to a pipers' club meeting in Manchester a couple of years ago where the m/f ratio was 1:1.
-The Northeast Tionol was at 30:1 the first time I attended back in 2001, but has gotten as low as 4:1 in recent years (15 female pipers out of about 60 pipers total in 2008).
-Nowadays, girls consistently take one or more of the top three marks in piping competitions at the fleadh, year after year, especially in slow airs. Ergo there must be plenty of girls learning the pipes.

So things are changing. It really helps to have female role models out there (Hi Susanne! Hi Máire! Hi Debbie!), and it also really helps to have supportive male mentors/teachers/pipemakers (you know who you are, gentlemen). So for all you guys out there who think there should be more women pipers, remember: your attitude can make a big difference.

On the other hand, it's not all roses: I had a bizarre conversation at a session a few months ago with a bodhran player who looked me up and down as I was strapping in and informed me (jokingly, I think) that I couldn't play pipes because I had -- and I quote -- "bits in the wrong places." I patiently replied that yes, there were not as many female pipers as male ones, but that our numbers were growing. He asked me to name some female pipers, and when I did, he cut me off with -- another joke, I think? --" Yeah, but the last two are lesbians."

Sigh.

Yes, but you tell that story as if you were dealing with a human being or something. In any case we all know of that ancient race of female Amaceltian pipers who strategically removed all the stick-outy-bits that interfered with bag or bellows. If modern women were more willing to sacrifice along the same lines we'd have many great female pipers today as well.

[Nanohedron]

In any case we all know of that ancient race of female Amaceltian pipers who strategically removed all the stick-outy-bits that interfered with bag or bellows. If modern women were more willing to sacrifice along the same lines we'd have many great female pipers today as well.

I prefer opiates.

I think this second part is evident.

[KAD]

I have noticed that most truly good pipers are green-eyed. Furthermore, I have noticed that most great pipers are only ever photographed in black-and-white. Even further, I have noticed that most pipers are right-handed.

Dang! I was so close -- I have green eyes AND am right-handed, but I've stupidly allowed myself to be photographed in color. If only I'd known.

I will admit that I did wince at the 'but the last two were lesbians' statement. You have my permission to punch that bast*rd. Really hard. Tell him I sent the message if he starts crying. Actually, call him a wussy-boy first.

Thanks! I thought about punching him at the time, but decided he wasn't worth the risk of injuring my hand and not being able to play the f*ck out of the next set of reels, right in his ear. Revenge, after all, is a dish best served cold.

[Black Rose]

You can choose to disbelieve this, but I swear: my wife can identify the sex of a violinist/fiddler simply by listening, with about 99% accuracy. How could she do that if there are no differences at some basic level?

I don't care if it's cultural, genetic, learned, taught, right or wrong -- it is what it is.

I do choose to disbelieve that. How does she identify the gender of the violinist/fiddler? What criteria? If "delicacy" and "expression" are your criteria, I know plenty of women who rip the sh*t out of tunes and men who play gently and expressively.

I asked her about it, but it's not an analytical kind of thing. It's like being able to tell Irish fiddle from Scottish. Or County Clare from County Sligo. How can you tell Kevin Burke from James Kelly? You just can, if you can -- but many people can't. Sure there are a few things you might describe generally, but there are more you can't, and any given thing you might put your finger on will have plenty of exceptions.

"It is what it is..." I don't think so. If that had been people's attitude, things like the suffrage movement or the abolition movement would have been dead in the water, as women and non-whites were too delicate and weak-minded or whatever to be involved in politics. That's just how it was. The science of the time (say 19th-early 20th century) even offered biological evidence of that. Ridiculous.

I'm not saying things don't change, but if you're looking for explanations of the current state of *is* there's no point to getting pissed off at me for telling you how things are at the moment. What bugs me is people who seem to think that everyone is the same. It's crazy to think that men and women should have the same preferences, wants, and desires. Not without hormone treatments anyway.

The economic explanations don't hold up for highland piping. Unlike fiddle, button box, or harp, which all cost about the same as a set of highland pipes, you can learn how to pipe for free. Everything from the instruction to the instrument and the uniform is provided free of charge by some bands. Not as many as in the past, but it's still out there.

FWIW, I take my pipes to schools to demonstrate. Boys and Girls at a young age are both interested. Boys generally seem more excited about them, and girls are more prone to complain about the noise. Only girls have offered up, unsolicited, "I hate the sound of bagpipes." Not black-and-white or neat little boxes by any means, just trends, preferences, and general tendencies. There is *no* piping tradition where I live. The band I play in is lead by a woman. It's still mostly men.

This is another one of those heated arguments all around the actual facts. What you observe above is well documented in psycho-acoustic terms. When you produce music in the studio for instance, there are formal formulas to determine what frequencies are going to irritate the hell out of women, and if little girls are your target demographic for instance, you mix the track specifically not to offend their genetically unavoidably female little ears. The factors involved are less psychological or cultural than they are genetic, physical, and measurable. The way the sound spectrum is perceived by any listener is based entirely upon the various structures of the inner and out ear, which, yes contrary to those who desperately want to pretend otherwise, are fundamentally different male to female. The Highland bagpipes for example, do their evil work right in the frequency ranges that really really almost invariably annoy the female ear structure.

Women do tend to hate the sound of bagpipes. Women do tend to not like a lot of bass either. On both ends of those spectrums you have very few women playing screaming rock guitar leads and even fewer whumping away on bass guitar. There is absolutely no cultural taboo against chick rock bands. In fact they automatically have an advantage if they can play at all. And sure, there may be some sort of cultural norming involved in rock chicks preferring to hang around boy bands rather than form chick bands, but when it comes down to it the types of "sounds" women like are measurably different from the types of sounds men like.

[Nanohedron]

...but when it comes down to it the types of "sounds" women like are measurably different from the types of sounds men like.

Makes me wonder idly how symphony orchestras don't wind up bloodbaths, then. You know, just sayin'.

[Ceann Cromtha]

Women do tend to not like a lot of bass either.

I find that statement contrary to my personal experience with regard to sound preferences, namely, ever since high school I've noticed that females generally prefer a higher bass-to-treble ratio setting on their car sound systems and males tend to prefer a higher treble-to-bass ratio. Maybe this is due to the following interrelationship:

(1) sexual dimorphism: males tend to have a lower pitched voice because they tend to be bigger (and have a larger supralaryngeal vocal tract producing a lower fundamental frequency in their speech) and, inversely, women tend to have a higher pitched voice because they are smaller (and have a smaller supralaryngeal vocal tract producing a higher fundamental frequency in their speech); and

(2) (heterosexual) men and women are attracted to the opposite sex and find many features of the opposite sex attractive (e.g., women associate lower frequencies with men and men associate higher frequencies with women).

[ferris54]

So by your reckoning, viz woman liking bass tones, any woman pipers should play Bb sets, which clearly they can't do due thier small hands.

Clearly the reason woman
don't play
the pipes is because of thier breasts, the physical effort involved and the lack of technical ability in maintaining pipes.......

[Ceann Cromtha]

So by your reckoning, viz woman liking bass tones, any woman pipers should play Bb sets, which clearly they can't do due thier small hands...

No, I was simply refuting the claim that woman don't like bass (tones).

[highland-piper]

What point are you trying to make here? That there is some kind of inherent, intrinsic, genetic component to female brains which somehow equates to not liking bagpipes?

I never said anything about genetics.

No one knows what parts of the brain make some people like some sounds and not others. There could be physiological or neurological reasons to explain some aspect of preference. There might not be. Certainly at least some of musical instrument preference is cultural.

The point is simply this: for whatever reason (physiological, neurological, and/or cultural), women, on average, seem to not enjoy bagpipes as much as men. It's the only answer to the question that addresses all the points that have been raised.

Here's a counterpoint to ponder. If you attend any lower-tier professional orchestra in the USA, the violin section is dominated by women. Go figure. I say "any" but I haven't been to all of them. Maybe there is one somewhere that's mostly men, but most of them are mostly women. On the other hand, the brass is usually mostly men.

BTW, I did a wee experiment last night. I skipped through about an hour's worth of traditional music on my iTunes (all 34GB of it), just playing a few bars from the beginning of each track and made my boyfriend (poor guy) try to guess the gender of the musicians. He was able to get the vast majority of them correct on gender and a significant number correct on naming the musician (I'm not giving made up stats. In the best tradition of utterly halfas*sed research, I didn't bother counting and calculating the percentages of correct answers). He said the playing style was only indicative of who it might be, which made him more likely to correctly guess the player's gender and also that there were a lot of other variables he made use of -- i.e. Something might obviously be Cape Breton fiddle, the recording is quite rough and scratchy, which means it's unlikely to be Natalie McMaster. Not too many other female Cape Breton fiddlers have made that many recordings, especially older recordings, so the musician is probably male.

I don't think that's at all relevant to the OP's initial question.

Since your BF was seemingly familiar with the music in question, it wasn't really a fair test. If you played those same tunes for my wife, she would be very successful too (I've done it), even though she's not familiar with the music. She probably *couldn't* correctly identify Irish vs. Scottish vs. Cape Breton. Her skill is also strictly limited to violin/fiddle players.

I agree that your BF's ability to identify a wide variety of musicians by having become familiar with their playing styles, and having a good understanding of the history and so forth has little, if anything, to do with the initial question. But my wife's ability is quite different. She isn't familiar with more than a very few Scottish/Irish/Cape Breton fiddlers. And she doesn't listen to classical music regularly. So you could play bits of 20 violinists playing Bach's works for solo violin, and she'd tell you which recordings were made by men, and which by women, even though she had never heard recordings of any of the violinists in question. I think this is related to the original question, because it indicates that there is something about gender that can be heard in (at least some) music, by some people. If it's something that can be heard by the trained ear, then it's something some people will have a preference for (one way or the other).

That is exactly what the original question was really about to my mind: "what is it about bagpipes that make them more popular with men than women?"

[billh]

Sexual dimorphism in humans is really, really subtle. It may not seem like it to us sometimes, but that's because we're not objective. There's just no way the dimorphism argument explains a 20:1 ratio, or even a 5:1 ratio (which seems closer to the real number, nowadays). Most of the truly scientific studies of sexual dimorphism in the areas of cognitive science are talking about very small deviations from the mean response - statistically significant, yes, but the "bell curves" mostly overlap, if you know what I mean.

On the other hand, cultural issues are very complex and it's entirely believable that ratios of 40:1 and even higher can be maintained in certain endeavors even when you can't point to an overt form of discrimination at work.

Let me put a concrete, related example to you. Where I live there is a traditional music group for students from about 1st year to 6th year (i.e. 'junior high' to 'high school'). Membership is overwhelmingly female, on all instruments. I think it's 20:1 or more... does that mean that "men" are relatively unequipped for traditional music, or uninterested? I think not, but these are the sorts of ill-founded speculations that some folks on this list seem to be entertaining about women and piping.

There have been women playing the uilleann pipes since before the term 'uilleann' was used for them. Photo captions suggest that it was perceived as a bit of a novelty then, as some think it is now, but given the apparent male domination of instrumental irish traditional music of the day, it is noteworthy that the ratio was not much higher than 20:1... in Francis O'Neill's chapter on "pipers of distinction" of the early 20th century, 2 of the 35 listed were women, or just under 18:1.




Bill

p.s. - now if you want to talk genetics, get a look at the fingers on Mollie Morrisey!

[KAD]

There have been women playing the uilleann pipes since before the term 'uilleann' was used for them. Photo captions suggest that it was perceived as a bit of a novelty then, as some think it is now, but given the apparent male domination of instrumental irish traditional music of the day, it is noteworthy that the ratio was not much higher than 20:1... in Francis O'Neill's chapter on "pipers of distinction" of the early 20th century, 2 of the 35 listed were women, or just under 18:1.

Nice post, Bill, thanks. And yeah, Mollie's fingers are incredible. I've always wondered what happened to her after her tour of England.

If you add in Anna Barry and Margaret Murphy, both of whom won piping prizes, the early 20th c ratio goes even lower. There were several female players in the Cork Pipers Club run by Sean Wayland. A letter in the NPU archives lists the union pipers in Munster in 1911; out of the 31 pipers listed, 6 are female (plus one more is listed as playing the warpipes).

Side note -- Sean closes his letter as follows: "I fear the union bagpipes will never be popular while the prices of learners sets are so prohibitive. Few can afford to buy, and reeds to the tune of 2 for sixpence."

[TheSilverSpear]

Nice post, Bill. Cheers.

"A pretty little Irish piper." Lovely stuff.

I still don't believe for an instant that women play music differently than men because they are women and that there is some physiological component to the assertion that women allegedly don't like the bagpipes. Given that they struggle to isolate a physiological component for things like schizophrenia -- and there's a lot of money going into researching that -- it's a bit of a stretch to argue such a thing exists for something as ambiguous and culturally construed as musical taste. I imagine if you were to do a study of the types of music people listen to, looking for statistically significant differences between men and women, you'd probably find that the standard deviation within your independent variable (gender) is pretty wide but not find much difference in the dependent variable (music preferences). But then the beauty of such studies is that you can manipulate your results by asking the "right" (or "wrong" depending on your point of view) questions.

[Cathy Wilde]

But then the beauty of such studies is that you can manipulate your results by asking the "right" (or "wrong" depending on your point of view) questions.

Indeed. And often, the questioner doesn't even realize his or her questions might be biased in the first place!

Thanks for this thread and all the thinking. It's been great fun.

Now for an even bigger one: "Pipers (regardless of gender): Smarter than other instrumentalists, or ... ? " (and I *KNOW* I'm biased )

[highland-piper]

I still don't believe for an instant that women play music differently than men because they are women and that there is some physiological component to the assertion that women allegedly don't like the bagpipes.

If you could prove it you could win a Nobel Prize.

As I've said, no one knows what causes different people to like different types of sounds -- but it's clearly something in the brain -- just no one knows where or how. Since the mechanism is not known, it's impossible to know if there might be differences between men and women.

Whatever the underlying cause, it seems pretty clear that the reason highland piping is male-dominated is self de-selection by women. Women are capable, and women have been involved at almost every level since the beginning of recorded piping history. Interestingly, in pipe bands, tenor drumming seems to be at least half women, so you really can't argue that there's any ingrained cultural anti-women thing going on in bands. Willie Ross, perhaps the most influential (Highland) piper of the 20th century, learned pipes from his mother.

[rorybbellows]

My take on it would be that women play differently from men ,not because they are women but because they are individuals .Most accomplished musicians will try and put some of their personality into their playing and if that musician is a women maybe some of her femininity is instilled in the music , with that, some listeners are very empathetic(a talent in its self) to the music and can pick up on that femininity .

Just to clarify I in no way think that women musician are inferior to men and in certain aspects are better, this thread could just as well have been titled “ why aren’t there more female pipers”and we would all benefit if there was.

Clearly the reason woman don't play the pipes is because of thier breasts, the physical effort involved and the lack of technical ability in maintaining pipes.......

Ferrit has raised a very interesting point, and one that I can’t understand.
How can a drooling brain dead Neanderthal learn to use a computer?

RORY
ps What relevance are Mollie Morriseys fingers?
Apart from the fact that she has them, none.