Ok, I’m coming into this argument probably pretty late, and I agree that people want women in high-earning positions because they see it as the way to close wage gaps, but I think op’s point is that we need to address the gender disparity in the arts. The discrimination faced by women and poc in the music world should not be brushed off in favor of STEM. I’m not sure what your degree is, but as a woman in music composition, I certainly notice the disparity, both in personal experience and study of the topic.
[Note that this is probably gonna be a long reply and I’m sorry I’m submitting an essay for something that could take, like, a sentence.]
[Second note that I’m using composition as my main point of reference because that’s what I’m most familiar with, but my sister, a graphic novelist/ concept artist pursuing a degree in drawing and painting, could probably fill in the art side.]
As a personal anecdote, my composition department at university has a departmental every week, and about halfway through my first semester in 2015, I looked around the room. About 20% of the 120-or-so people in there were women. Of our 8 professors related to the composition department, only 2 were women, and only 1 actually taught composition. Here’s a good graphic of the disparity in academics:
(and the source: https://www.wqxr.org/story/her-music-crusading-composers-present-past/ It’s a bit of an old article, but it still shows what I’m saying. And it’s a little strange to see my university on that graphic, even if we have one of the better ratios.)
Here’s another article about women in the pop music industry, showing that this is not only a classical music issue: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/arts/music/music-industry-gender-study-women-artists-producers.html.
The statistics are overwhelmingly stacked against women (and evermore so women of color). Ricky O’Bannon’s article (http://www.bsomusic.org/stories/by-the-numbers-female-composers/) states that works by all female composers, living and dead, performed in concert by large symphony orchestras only accounts for 1.8% of repertoire. In the category of works by living composers, women make up 14.3% of the repertoire. These are numbers from the 2014-2015 season, but things haven’t really improved from there. Note that for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (the model symphony in two of my academic papers on the subject) of the 79 individual pieces listed on the 2018/19 season, only one was written by a woman.
We’ve made progress since my freshman year, for sure. Here’s a pretty good opinion piece about more recent (like, late 2017) efforts for women in music: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/female-composers-are-making-great-strides-why-isnt-the-classical-music-world-supporting-them-/2017/11/03/1ee87e34-bda9-11e7-af84-d3e2ee4b2af1_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0388cdf510ce
We’ve also had some successes in the media composition world: Pinar Toprak became the first (hopefully of many) female composer hired by Marvel Studios and Sunna Wehrmeijer is the composer for She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.
TL;DR: The gender gap in arts will decrease, but we still have a lot of work to do, and brushing over the arts in favor of STEM isn’t the way to do it.
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