27 French orchestras, 13 Canadians orchestras, 10 Swiss orchestras, 18 orchestras from the UK and 8 orchestras from Australia and New Zealand have been studied. The number of musicians and the number of women have been assessed by visiting the official website of the orchestras, counting the number of musicians and identifying the women among them. When pictures of the musicians weren't shown, a little risk of error might happen, because nome first names are ambiguous, but the total error remains very small. Piccolos are included in flutes, cor anglais in oboe, bassclarinet in clarinet and contrebassoon in bassoons.
Conductors are mostly men, and only a handful of women has been found among them in all the orchestras studied together.
However women are more numerous among instrumentists, as seen there.
Percentage of women in orchestras
Nb orch 27 13 10 18 8
Total 37 45 39 40 46
Strings
Violin 59 61 60 57 66
Solo Vl 46 52 45 50 46
Viola 50 40 51 45 53
Solo Va 33 27 43 34 35
Cello 38 49 38 50 40
Solo Vc 30 32 16 29 28
Bass 19 15 10 23 17
Solo Cb 26 21 0 8 12.5
Wood-
Winds
Flute 57 82 57 57 75
Oboe 20 58 24 54 48
Clarinet 19 39 11 18 20
Bassoon 18 41 29 33 58
Brass
Horns 9 45 9 13 38
Trumpet 3 13 6 4 14
Trombone 0 17 4 8 0
Tuba 0 8 20 0 0
Others
Percussion 7 13.5 11 9 12
Harp 80 89 92 71 100
Conclusions
In all five countries (6 actually, but Australia and New Zealand are grouped together), women are a big part of the orchestra but not the majority, between 37% (France) and 46 % (Australia/NZ). Men still ounumber women, but parity is slowly reaching orchestras.
The most interesting element of those comparisons is that all orchestras have similar trends in a lot of groups : harps, flutes are mostly women, among violins, women are the majority, there is roughly an even number of men and women for viols and cellos. For a same string instrument, there are less women among solo players than among the total players.
Groups with few women are always the same : basses, percussions, brass instruments (except horns in a few cases).
Some instruments show variable patterns depending on the countries, notably woodwinds other than flutes, and horns among the brass : while horn players aren't many in European countries, in Canada and Australia+NZ, more than 1/3 of horn players are women.
While in France, oboists are only 20% women, Canada and the UK have a majority of women among oboists, and Australia+NZ women are almost 50 % of all oboists.
Bassoons also vary a lot between countries : less than 20% in France, but more than half in Australia+NZ of bassoonists are women, with other countries being between.
Usually, when the percentage of total women in orchestras is higher, the number of women playing wind instruments is higher as well.
