For years, the conversation about gender inequity in the music business has centered on the visible endpoints: who's on the charts, who's nominated for Grammys, who's headlining festivals. A new report released Wednesday argues that those numbers are actually a symptom — and that the real story starts much earlier, at the negotiating table, when an artist, songwriter or producer first gets signed.

Music's Gender Parity Index, released by the nonprofit She Is The Music in partnership with the music-data platform ROSTR, is billed as the first study of its kind to measure gender representation across the industry's rosters rather than its outcomes. Drawing on more than 500 record labels, publishers, management companies and booking agencies, the report finds that women make up just 29.7% of rostered "IP-generating creators" — artists, songwriters, producers and other multi-hyphenates signed to a company. The number barely moves when you slice it by sector: 32% at major labels, 31.7% in professional management, 34.2% at major agencies.

The imbalance runs even deeper on the business side of the industry. Women account for only 26.7% of managers and 25.9% of agents in ROSTR's preliminary workforce data — the people who identify talent, negotiate deals and, in large part, decide who gets a shot in the first place.

"The imbalance we see on charts, festival stages and credits starts long before the spotlight — it starts with who gets signed, represented, and backed," said Laura Segura, Executive Director of She Is The Music, in the report's release. "This report looks upstream at those career-shaping decisions, because more equitable rosters can change both the creativity and the economics of music."