One Victorious Beyoncé Does Not Equality Make

"Wow, I really was not expecting this," a beaming Beyoncé said Sunday night as she addressed the audience in Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena after accepting her Grammy for Best Country Album.

Whether she was expecting it or not, it was—by all accounts—a very good night for the former Destiny’s Child singer who happens to be the most-awarded female artist of all time. She’s now won 35 Grammys and been nominated 99 times.

“Cowboy Carter,” the album for which Beyoncé won the country award this year, also scooped up Album of the Year—the Grammy’s top award—making her the first Black woman to win the honor in more than 25 years. (The last was Lauryn Hill with her album ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’ in 1999.) Beyoncé is also the first Black woman to win in the country category. 

Other women won big on Sunday night, too. 

Chappell Roan won Best New Artist; Amy Allen became the first woman to win the Songwriter of the Year award; Sabrina Carpenter secured the Best Pop Solo Performance prize as well as the prize for Best Pop Vocal Album. Charli xcx dominated in the Best Dance Pop Recording Category and Norah Jones took home one of the coveted gilded gramophone trophies.

It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that on Monday morning many headlines declared the 67th rendition of the awards to have been ruled by women. And sure, those wins are all worthy of celebration. 

But it’s also more nuanced than that. Because even though Sunday night was good for women’s major wins, it wasn’t an exceptional night for women’s wins overall. 

Let’s back up. 

Who’s Actually Being Nominated

Last week, an in-depth new report published by the international audience strategy consultancy AKAS, shed a critical and crucial light on the reality of the recording industry, regardless of what the headlines might claim.

AKAS found that between 2017 and 2024, 8,580 nominations were made across 103 Grammy categories. But despite the popular narrative over that time period, 4 in 5 nominations and wins have been given to men, with women receiving just 1 in 5 nominations and wins. (These figures don’t take the most recent nominations and awards into account since the research was done prior to the 2025 Grammys.) 

During 2024’s Grammys, AKAS found that across all 94 categories, just 1 in 4 nominees—or 24%—and 1 in 3 winners—or 32%—were women. 

As part of its research, AKAS conducted a headline analysis of online articles published between 2017 and 2024, which revealed a positive bias within both specialist music and general news media when covering women and the Grammys. In other words, the headlines made it sound like women were better represented than they actually were.

In 2024, AKAS found, almost a quarter of headlines relating to women and the Grammys contained the words “dominate” or “rule” and similar framings were also detected in published articles in 2023, 2021, 2020 and 2019. 

The Dangers of Bias

So what’s the big takeaway here? 

We enjoy celebrating wins. Of course we do, and we should: We like to see progress toward a music industry (or any industry, for that matter) that’s fairer and more equitable for all. Newsrooms also like to tell their readers something new, something unexpected, a pivot in the same-old story. But it’s also the responsibility of media—of anyone with a public platform, in fact—to separate wishful narrative from hard-to-swallow reality and to recognize when bias is at play.

There are many things that must be done in order to ensure that factors like gender and race are never a barrier to success in the music industry, Luba Kassova a director and co-founder of AKAS, writes in the report. “News media should be (but isn’t) one of the enablers of positive change for women through reporting the full truth,” she writes.

“To become enablers, news outlets must dig beyond the press releases of the Recording Academy [which presents the Grammys] or other music institutions,” she adds. “Fact-checking is a catalyst to much-needed transparency on the part of the Academy.”

Are Women Really Dominating?

In the spirit of this, and for the avoidance of doubt, here’s what the picture really looked like at the 2025 Grammy Awards according to Kassova: Just 28% of nominations went to women, while 69% went to men. And as for the wins? Men secured 61% of the wins across the 94 categories. 

Now answer me this: Are women really ruling?

“These few stats from [Sunday] night unequivocally evidence the structural barriers that stand in the way between women and music recognition,” commented Kassova. “Women are still very much on the periphery of the most powerful jobs in music, yet are frequently heralded by the Recording Academy and news media as dominating,” she added. 

One thing we’ve learned from other industries is that when it comes to creating greater gender equality, change is always gradual. In fact, it’s often glacial. What we’ve also learned is that it doesn’t happen on its own. The right infrastructure is needed to promote and support evolution. In relation to the Grammys, that infrastructure might include the committee of members who cast votes to determine who deserves the often career-crowning honor of winning an award. 

Last October, the Recording Academy announced it had exceeded a goal set back in 2019 of adding 2,500 more women to its voting members. That sounds like a lot, but guess what? As Kassova notes in her report, women still only represent about 28% of the more than 13,000 voting members.

Clearly, much more still needs to be done to ensure women in the music industry are not held back by bias or by discrimination. But before we even begin to consider what that could entail, we need to recognize and admit the uncomfortable truth of where we stand.

There are women who have broken records, bucked trends and dismantled norms. There are also many, many women who are still desperately trying just to be seen and heard.