It is a truth universally acknowledged that marketing people use good-looking photos of good-looking (or artificially improved) people to sell, you know, anything, classical music included. That's absolutely part of the musical world we live in, as many have said, including Jenni Murray, who this week tells the Radio Times: "The women who seem to be most welcome are the ones who are prepared to go along with the old idea that sex sells." Nicola Benedetti, one of the musicians Dame Jenni mentions, has herself talked openly of how she has been conscious of what's happened to her image, and how she has variously manipulated or been manipulated by it.

However, underneath the glamour, or pseudo-glamour, of marketing campaigns and promo shots for, say, female trumpeters from Norway or England, there's another story of how the attitudinal oil tanker of classical music's sexual politics may at last be changing.

Take the make-up of British orchestras, which are becoming more feminine across all departments, not just the upper strings and woodwinds, but the double basses, brass and percussion too, if admittedly more slowly. And you'll find a virtually equal percentage of girls and boys in the ranks of the National Youth Orchestras of Great Britain and Scotland.

Marin Alsop will be the first woman to conduct Last Night of the Proms. Photograph: Marco Brescia/AP



There's also that hardiest perennial of sexual misrepresentations in classical music: the absence of women conductors on the podiums of major orchestras. Yet that too is changing, and not just because of the more-than-symbolic importance of Marin Alsop's appointment as conductor of this year's Last Night of the Proms. There are more female conductors working across Britain, Europe and the world than ever before. Yes, it's taken musical culture too long to get over ingrained prejudice, and yes, there's still work to be done for women to be accepted at the very top of the profession – as music director of say, the London Symphony Orchestra or the Berlin Philharmonic – but it is happening. Just ask musicians such as Susanna Mälkki, Simone Young, Julia Jones or Jessica Cottis (Dame Jenni's mentor before she takes on the BBC Philharmonic in Bizet's Carmen overture for a Woman's Hour special on 21 June): all of them, to a conductor, musicians who want their musicianship to speak before their gender.

Woman's Hour host Jenni Murray. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian



There's something else too, a rarely spoken cultural truth, that used to be the case in some parts of British education and society, which might explain some of the more odious examples of outright sexism in musical life, such as the brass-player gags and a Thomas Beecham anecdote that Dame Jenni quotes. Many musicians in previous generations might have felt the need to be macho precisely because music is, or was, the opposite of a macho subject.

To be a classical musician marks you out when you're growing up in ways that many might feel they have to compensate for by playing the role of a testosterone-filled caveman. It's all front, though, which is why the progressive feminisation of classical music in its performers, conductors and composers is so profoundly positive.

It's like Colin Davis used to say, talking about when he returned to the LSO in the mid-1990s: in place of the rowdy, beery, mostly male belligerence he had faced decades before, the orchestra was more flexible, more musical, and easier to work with. Davis put that down to the fact that there were more women in the orchestra. That opens up another can of sexual stereotypes, but at least suggests how greater gender equality is a good thing for musical culture – and for music itself.