Carrie Underwood Doesn’t Know How to Fix Gender Disparity in Country Music

She is one of the few female artists who get consistently played at country radio, but Carrie Underwood is still bothered by the low percentage of women being played on the airwaves, compared to male artists. Although change seems to, slowly, be coming, it’s not soon enough, or effective enough, for Underwood.

“It’s hard for me to find songs because songwriters aren’t writing for women,” Underwood said while speaking during Country Radio Seminar. “Why would they? I mean, that’s their jobs. That’s what they’re going to do every day. That pays their mortgage, puts their kids through college. They’re giving the consumers what they want, which is dude songs.”

“The chicken or the egg, what came first?” she continued. “How to fix it? Nobody’s writing and it’s hard to find great songs. So I’ll write it myself. I just feel like being aware is step one. And I feel like it probably is that it takes more people stepping up and doing what’s right.”

Underwood doesn’t know what the answer is, but she admits that the problem bothers her more than she would like.

“If I could find the answer. I could save it!” said the singer. “I wake up every day expecting for a light bulb to go off in my head and I’m still waiting.”

Underwood hasn’t found that answer, but she did reveal that her inability to sleep, while pregnant with her second son, Jacob, allowed her to write her upcoming book, Find Your Path.

“It took so much time,” Underwood acknowledged. “I really had no idea what I was getting into when I started writing the book. I was just like, we have the clean eating thing going on and obviously this is a part of my life. People would ask me about it. It seemed like a good idea. So it’s kind of like, let’s give it a try and see if I have anything to say. It was so challenging and wonderful.

“And at the time I was writing a lot of the book, I was pregnant and I had the worst pregnancy insomnia, which actually ended up being a blessing because that’s when I wrote the majority of the book,” she added. “The window from 2:00 a.m. to 5:00 or 6:00 was that me time to write.”

Photo Credit: Getty / Taylor Hill