Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso is the ‘song of the summer’ – but it hides a worrying trend

By Glenn Fosbraey, University of Winchester

Sabrina Carpenter’s “song of the summer”, Espresso is still riding high in the charts. The only thing keeping it off the top spot in the current UK singles charts is her new release, Please Please Please.

It’s safe to say the new princess of pop has the music world at her feet. But a peek behind the scenes suggests that she is the latest example of a female face fronting a male-dominated industry.

Before going any further, though, I need to address the elephant in the room. I’m writing about gender bias in popular music as a man who works in academia – a field also criticised for its lack of gender equity. While there’s little I can do about being born a man, I can do something about drawing attention to the inherent gender bias in pop music.

Since the year 2000, there have been 275 UK number one songs with women as the lead artist or co-lead artist, making up 47% of the 585 total. So far so equal. But when we look at how many of those 275 also had all-female songwriters and producers, there’s see a significant imbalance. Only Beautiful by Christina Aguilera (2002), Running up that Hill by Kate Bush (which went back to number one after appearing in Stranger Things in 2022) and Strangers by Kenya Grace (2024) meet this criteria.

That’s only three songs in 24 years, and less than 0.5% of the overall total. And, even then, all the instruments on Beautiful and Running Up were performed by men and they both had male music video directors. This leaves Strangers as the only track with no male involvement at all.

That’s 0.2% of female-led singles with no male involvement in the 21st century. A remarkable statistic considering the UK singles chart has been running for 72 years and spawned nearly 1,500 number ones. On the flipside, the percentage of male-led songs with no female involvement stands at 57%.

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