In June, David Israelite, chief executive of the National Music Publishers Association, announced that Yoko Ono will be getting long overdue credit for her contribution to John Lennon’s “Imagine.” The announcement came at an event where the song was honored with the association’s Centennial Song award. During a 1980 BBC interview, Lennon admitted that the 1971 hit “should be credited as a Lennon-Ono song, because a lot of it, the lyric and the concept, came from Yoko.” “Those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution,” he explained during that interview.

When New York-based writer and activist Rebecca Lentjes published her January article “Top 10 Living Women Composers,” she expected to hear from disgruntled women who felt they deserved to be on the list. But, she explains in a blog, every single negative comment was from a man. “These men like to claim that they aren’t sexist—that sexism, in fact, does not exist, but that women are inherently ‘inferior’ composers,” says Lentjes. “The idea that sexism isn’t real is perpetuated by men who don’t want women to have the things they have; the idea that women are incapable of writing music is sexism.”

A music critic since graduating from college in 2012, Lentjes grew weary of attending concerts featuring exclusively white men. “About a year ago I made the decision only to review concerts with at least one woman (or trans or nonbinary) composer on the program. To pave the way for a female language, female voices, and female space, we must continue straining to hear each other through the noise of misogyny—and, more importantly, amplifying what we hear,” she says.