Like countless other industries, the hip-hop industry has an omnipresent male foothold that has been the precedent since its inception in the 1970s, and continues to be even today. The most visible element of hip-hop, the most commercially viable, is the art of rap, one enjoyed and performed by both men and women alike. However, the ratio of female to male emcees are greatly disproportionate--as mentioned, it is a male-dominated industry and culture. Although the number of female artists have increased since its inception, female artists still remain far behind their male counterparts. Additionally, the amount of sexual objectification and exploitation of women within the industry continues to increase, portraying women through a derogatory lens--much of this content produced majority by men. Women are not finding much success within this cultural revolution that has been prompted off of the idea of moving forward, instead women are being suppressed and restrained from doing so. .
Hip-hop was born as a cultural revolution, as a successor of the civil rights movement. It gave the disenfranchised the power of voice; however, since then it has become a hypersexualized genre stimulated more by quantity rather than quality. Rob Hurton, editor of St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, interprets this idea, "Hip-hop is now a big business with more attention paid to public image, product endorsements, and record deals that actual social change." Much of its public image is promoted through means of exploiting women–especially black women–through visual and auditory mediums. It has come to a point where "the exploitation of black women has become almost required for an artist to develop an identity, to develop a sense of status, to be a powerful, desireable, successful black male image of hip-hop.as part of [their] performance," explains Tricia Rose, professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.