Programming Inequality: Gender Representation on Canadian Country Radio (2005-2019)

In May 2015, a consultant for country radio revealed a decades’ long practice of limiting space for songs by female artists. He encouraged program directors to avoid playing songs by women back-to-back and advocated for programming their songs at 13-15% of station playlists. His words sparked debate within the industry and drew attention to growing inequalities on radio and within the genre. The majority of these discussions have centered on US country radio, with limited attention to the growing imbalance on the format in Canada. While country format radio in both countries subscribe to a practice of gender-based programming, Canadian program directors are governed by the federal Broadcasting Act, which regulates dissemination of Canadian content. Using metadata extracted from one of the main radio monitoring services – Mediabase, this paper examines gender-related trends on Canadian country format radio between 2005 and 2019. Through data-driven analysis of Mediabase’s weekly re-ports, this paper shows declining representation of songs by women on Canadian country radio and addresses the impact of Canadian content regulations on this process.