Women and symphony orchestras : a comparison of 5 countries

This post is gonna be a summary in ENglish of all the previous posts in French, and has as an aim to compare five countries and the percentage of women in their orchestras, and by instrument.

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

Country      France     Canada    Switzerland     United Kingdom    Australia +New Zealand
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.