Gender per Year
Performer gender of chart songs, as a share of each year's total. Each song is annotated as solo female, all-female group, solo male, all-male group, or mixed group; the chart pools these into female, male, and mixed.
Linguistic Insights
Women's share reaches its lowest level in the 2010s
Female performers account for around 30 % of charted songs in the 1950s and 1960s but fall steadily to under 10 % in the 2010s. The trough coincides with the rise of Deutschrap, a male-dominated genre that became the largest in the German charts that decade (see Genres per Year →). A partial recovery follows in the 2020s, reflecting greater mainstream visibility for female rap and pop artists.
The feature era lifts "mixed" — but not lead women
Mixed-gender songs grow from under 10 % in the 1960s and 1970s to more than 30 % in the 2020s, driven by the now-standard practice of cross-gender guest features: a track by a male rapper featuring a female vocalist counts as mixed. This rise partly masks a continued scarcity of women as lead artists — the mixed category swells even as the female-lead share stays low.
Proportion of performer gender per year · Chart Songs only
These analyses are based on corpus data as of July 29, 2026.