The Observation of Gender Stereotyping in Music Instruments in 2021, and the Process of Musical Instrument Selections of Children

Abstract

In 2020, a research team in the music and music education department at Teachers College at Columbia University conducted an explanatory sequential research consisting of both the quantitative and the qualitative methods to contemplate the current status of the gender association in music in the instrument selections and the correlation in regard to the influence of a parent. This report investigates an answer for the following research questions: (1) Has there been less or more sex-stereotyping of musical instruments and crossed-over students who chose atypical instruments with regard to their genders over ten years? (2) Are there any parental influences in the process of a child’s musical instrument selection? (3) What similarities and differences are observed from the parents of those children? The result of this study answers the three research questions. This study describes that there has been lesser and lesser gender-stereotyping in musical instrument selection for ten years considering the number of cross-over students has increased through quantitative research. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the process of a child’s selecting musical instrument is projected from their parent’s perspectives. Besides the portraits of parents provided three themes.