structural:expansion, structural:scholar_edition
Role of women

Professional women instrumentalists are uncommon in rock genres such as heavy metal although bands such as Within Temptation have featured women as lead singers with men playing instruments. According to Schaap and Berkers, "playing in a band is a male homosocial activity, that is, learning to play in a band is a peer-based... experience, shaped by existing sex-segregated friendship networks. They note that rock music "is often defined as a form of male rebellion vis-à-vis female bedroom culture." (The theory of "bedroom culture" argues that society influences girls to not engage in crime and deviance by virtually trapping them in their bedroom; it was identified by a sociologist named Angela McRobbie.) In popular music, there has been a gendered "distinction between public (male) and private (female) participation" in music. "Several scholars have argued that men exclude women from bands or from the bands' rehearsals, recordings, performances, and other social activities". "Women are regarded as passive and private consumers of slick, prefabricated – hence, inferior – pop music..., excluding them from participating as high status rock musicians". One of the reasons that there are mixed gender bands is that "bands operate as tight-knit units in which homosocial solidarity – social bonds between people of the same sex... – plays a crucial role". In the 1960s rock music scene, "singing was sometimes an acceptable pastime for a girl, but playing an instrument... simply wasn't done".

"The rebellion of rock music was a male rebellion; the women – often, in the 1950s and '60s, girls in their teens – in rock sang songs as personæ dependent on their macho boyfriends...". Philip Auslander says that "Although there were many women in rock by the late 1960s, most performed only as singers, a feminine position in popular music". Though some women played instruments in American all-female garage rock bands, none of these bands achieved more than regional success. So they "did not provide viable templates for women's on-going participation in rock". In relation to the gender composition of heavy metal bands, it has been said that "eavy metal performers are almost exclusively male" "...at least until the mid-1980s" apart from "...exceptions such as Girlschool ". However, "...now maybe more than ever–strong metal women have put up their dukes and got down to it", "carv out a considerable place for selves." When Suzi Quatro emerged in 1973, "no other prominent female musician worked in rock simultaneously as a singer, instrumentalist, songwriter, and bandleader". According to Auslander, she was "kicking down the male door in rock and roll and proving that a female musician... and this is a point I am extremely concerned about... could play as well if not better than the boys".

An all-female band is a musical group in genres such as rock and blues which is composed of female musicians. This is distinct from a girl group, in which the female members are vocalists, though this terminology is not universally followed.