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Grammys president responds to #GrammysSoMale, says women need to "step up" to win

[Photo by: Lorde/Facebook]

There's no denying that the Grammys featured some spectacular performances from Kesha, Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga and more. A few scene favorites, including Foo Fighters and Mastodon, took home awards. (The rock and metal categories going unaired, of course.)

Read more: Here’s the full list of 2018 Grammy winners

However, #GrammysSoMale was a major topic of discussion, and for an obvious reason. All the Album Of The Year nominees were invited to perform solo during the awards show, but Lorde was not asked to perform her own music. And the only award a woman accepted during the live broadcast was Best New Artist winner Alessia Cara.

People had questions, and when Variety asked Recording Academy president Neil Portnow about the marginalization of women, he basically blamed women for not being good enough to receive nominations and take home awards.

“It has to begin with… women who have the creativity in their hearts and souls, who want to be musicians, who want to be engineers, producers, and want to be part of the industry on the executive level… [They need] to step up because I think they would be welcome,” he says. 

“I don’t have personal experience of those kinds of brick walls that you face but I think it’s upon us — us as an industry — to make the welcome mat very obvious, breeding opportunities for all people who want to be creative and paying it forward and creating that next generation of artists.”

Plus, Grammys producer Ken Ehrlich avoided answering the same question—and didn’t give a straightforward response as to why Lorde didn’t perform, while all the other (male) nominees for Album Of The Year did.

“I don’t know if it was a mistake. These shows are a matter of choices. We have a box and it gets full. She had a great album. There’s no way we can really deal with everybody,” Ehrlich said.

Which is true—there may not be room for everyone. But in a new study published by USC Annenberg, they found that out of the 899 individuals nominated for Grammy Awards between 2013 and 2018, 90.7 percent were male and only 9.3 percent were female.

Leaving the one female nominee off, especially with stats like that? Not cool. Clearly, there needs to be some change.

Lorde did share a strong statement with her gown last night, using a quote from Jenny Holzer to join the #TimesUp movement at this year’s Grammys. “The apocalypse will blossom,” the quote says.

It’s 2018—we can do better.

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