This is a post for the ladies, especially those who may be worried that drumming is a man’s world. But also for men who hope to get some insight into ladies’ experience.
For context, I’m a 41 year old small female who’s been playing 2 years at the time of this writing. I’m a pretty conservative player right now, as I consider it my SOLEMN DUTY to keep the beat, and don’t want to risk turning the beat around by losing my count when I do a crazy fill. So I just keep a solid beat most of the time.
I’m also a bit shy and quiet and can come across as lacking confidence – until I start playing, that is.
The Lone Female Drummer:
I’m sure it’s different in every circle. I’ll just speak about local musicians in coastal Connecticut who play at open mics, bars, and private events.
The first thing I noticed is that whenever I met anyone new at an open mic who wasn’t aware that I’m a drummer, they would ask me if I sang. Actually, they’re sometime so confident that female = singer that I’ve been called up to the stage to sing by someone while they were performing! Part of this might be that I have such a big purse that I can fit my drumsticks completely inside them. Love that purse!
After going out to open mics for a few months, I realized there’s a good reason people’s eyebrows raise as if they’re impressed when they learn I’m a drummer. I’ve never met a single female drummer at an open mic, and I’m usually the only female even playing an instrument. And I’m always the only female performer not singing lead vocals. So I’m truly unusual, for some reason.
But that’s open mics. What about local bands.
More men! But actually I’ve seen 3 female drummers, 2 of whom play fantastically. But yeah, that’s 3 females, less than 1 hand’s worth of fingers. Not much, considering I’ve seen scores of local bands.
What men expect from female drummers:
They expect you to suck. Actually, I was once sitting down talking with an excellent local pianist who plays with my old drum teacher. He was saying that it was great that me, a girl was drumming, and he was being really encouraging and supportive. But then he had to include an anecdote that accidentally revealed what he expected of females….he said:
Yeah, my other band auditioned for drummers one time, and we had a woman audition. But she was actually good!”
BUT SHE WAS ACTUALLY GOOD!! As in, even though she was a woman, she was good.
So yeah, low expectations. When I get to be a super-duper awesome drummer who feels entitled to ‘get the gig’ (as the great drummer Dave King would say), I’ll be able to tell you if these low expectations actually cause harm, but right now, it’s mainly just something I can laugh at.
Specifically because men get so surprised when they learn that you can even just hold the beat, it’s completely adorable.
Until it gets annoying. Who knows, maybe despite all the encouragement and praise I get from all the supportive musicians I meet, I do conform to their expectations! I mean, a lot of the songs they play, I barely know, and it seems they’ve all been playing these songs for the past 30 years. Even the songs that are only 10 years old.
But anyway, there’s this one guitarist I play with all the time that acts like because I’m a beginner, I need a special tutorial on how to drum on the song he’s leading on. Unfortunately, he doesn’t really know how to verbally communicate what a drummer needs to hear, and doesn’t realize that his rhythm guitar is really all that I need to hear. The other musicians keep telling him “just start playing, she’ll jump in”, and they apologize for him afterwards. He did apologize once, too, actually.
But then, wow, there’s this wonderful drummer (a veritable human metronome with 4 brains, one for each limb) who runs one of the open mics I go to, and actually teaches me the signature grooves to some songs before I start playing. He knows how to say what I need to hear so that I can understand what to do. So yeah, he sees that I’m a beginner, but he respects that I’m capable of learning and giving it a good shot.
What women think of female drummers:
“Girls can do anything!” is the message to a lot of women as soon as I sit my butt down on the drum throne. This is an empowering message, of course, but sadly, it’s also a direct reaction to the general assumption that “Girls can’t do things as well as boys can.”
Especially older women, they’ve had to deal with some much bullshit being explicitly told they can’t/shouldn’t do things because they’re a woman, it warms their heart to see me at the kit. A lot of them don’t even realize that I’m a beginner drummer, they just think it’s so cool that I’m playing.
Maybe they mistakenly believe that because I’m from a younger generation, I never had to overcome the sexism of low expectations (see the next section for my thoughts on that!).
But I think I must, because let me tell you, I have the same soul as these older women. It warms my heart whenever I hear of a little girl learning the drums. And I got so completely happy once when a young woman (early twenties) came up to me after I played and said she’d always wanted to learn drums, but never did. I encouraged her to give it a shot, she won’t regret it!
But part of the reason it warms my heart is because of the worst kind of sexism I’ve encountered: my own unexamined assumptions of what women can and can’t do!
My own sexism:
I was born in the early 80’s, when little girls were told they could do anything. I was never told that there was any profession or hobby that I should avoid because I was female. Unless you count high-school wrestling, when the coach said he’d rather quit coaching that teach me how to wrestle – but that one incident didn’t define my view of a woman’s role or capabilities.
What did define my view of a woman’s role, without my even realizing it, was that I just plain never saw a woman drummer, a video of a woman drumming, or even a picture of a woman drumming. I think I might have been told once Karen Carpenter was a drummer, but then the conversation moved on to that horrible joke about how Mama Cass should have given her that ham sandwich, and I didn’t give her drumming much though after that.
I did see a boatload of male drummers, though!
When I look back on it now, I realize that I had some weird idea that because drumming was so physical, that it took a special, masculine body to be able to do it. That girls just couldn’t drum as well as boys. This was not even a conscious thought – I simply never considered the drums as an option for me! I just knew drums were for boys. Especially when they made it look so sweaty and caveman-like.
The advantage to being female:
Oh boy, you get a ton of attention. It might be for a good reason (girl power!), or it might be for a bad reason (drooling over a woman), or it might be just genuine surprise, but this attention can be your friend.
Whether it counteracts the negative effects of low expectations, I am not able address yet, because I’m still a beginner.
First off, the extra attention comes wherever I go. So other musicians always want to introduce themselves to me, plan to play with me, ask me if I want to form a band with them, etc. And I figure it might smart to have a girl drummer in your band (compared to an equally qualified male drummer), because you’ll get attention from your audience, restaurant managers, etc.
That attention is how you’re going to make those big music bucks. That’s a joke, of course. Those big music bucks are more rare than female drummers!
This might be unfair for men, but I say: would you rather be a man and get lost in the crowd of male drummers, or to be a 110 pound middle-aged woman figuring out how to get her bass drum down the stairs?
You win some, you lose some.
Why it’s OK even if drumming is a man’s world:
First and foremost, it’s awesome to be a female drummer because its AWESOME TO BE A DRUMMER, full stop!
Second off, you’re going to be an old woman one day, and so you’re gonna want to be able to shred like this little grandma over here.
Finally, you’re going to find supportive people wherever you go, and very little heartfelt sexism. There might be jerks and possibly even the occasional creepy-crawly trying to create drama, but there’s no need to waste any energy worrying about them.
In general, even the men who say sexist things that sound sexist don’t do it on purpose, they’re just used to talking to men about men. I’m thinking of my dear drum teacher telling me stories of other drum students. He often starts with “a lot of guys….”, then corrects himself to say “guys and girls”, accidentally reminding me that he’s actually only talking about males, and “guys” is not gender-neutral to him! He wants me to succeed, but at the same time, he lives in the same mostly-male world of musicians that I live in.
Every door will be opened to you, as long as you’re kind, don’t talk trash about other players behind their backs, find a way to give genuine compliments to other players, shake hands and introduce yourself to every musician you can, play with anyone and everyone, and be as supportive to others as you would like them to be to you.
Oh yeah, and you’ve got to practice, too!