If you attend a concert by the San Francisco Symphony during the coming month, you’re likely to witness something that has thus far been shamefully rare: a woman on the podium of Davies Symphony Hall, conducting the orchestra.

I wish I didn’t have to feel so excited about this. I wish this little surge of female representation were as ordinary and unremarkable as the hundreds of months that have passed without anyone thinking to say, “Whoa, look at all the dudes.” But the facts are what they are.

It isn’t as though female conductors havenevertaken on conducting duties in these parts. A roster of women who have led the Symphony extends back to a single 1930 concert at the Civic Auditorium conducted by the Dutch-born Bay Area conductor Antonia Brico.

Still, the track record in San Francisco — as with nearly all orchestras and opera companies around the world — remains spotty. Until very recently, a woman on the podium has been a bit of a novelty.

And now look! May begins with the welcome return of Xian Zhang, the Chinese American music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra who made aterrific impressionin Davies in August. Then comes Karina Canellakis, the New York-born artist who holds posts in Amsterdam, London and Berlin.

Nathalie Stutzmann, whose acclaimed career as a contralto has now given way to an equally acclaimed one as a conductor — she’s about to take up the post of music director with the Atlanta Symphony — is set to make her San Francisco Symphony debut at the end of the month, and Ruth Reinhardt, the young assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony, arrives the week after that.

Where did all these women suddenly come from? One answer, a little glib but not entirely wrong, is to say that they’ve always been here. The number of women working in this field is large — much, much larger than a casual or even a careful observer might suspect.

Nearly a decade ago, the British music blogger Jessica Duchen helpfullycompiled a listof well over 100 female conductors. Talia Ilan, an Israeli conductor who was included in Duchen’s list, was inspired to go further.

She launched the Twitter and Facebook hashtag#oneconductoraday, an astonishing repository of female conductors, most of them current but also including a few historical ringers. Her daily posts have so far numbered just over 500, and she says she has more than 1,800 in the bank — names, information, and (this is key) a photo of each conductor actually wielding a baton.

Why am I doing#oneconductoraday?
1. Most of the people truly DIDN'T know there were so many women conductors.
2. Decision makers in the music industry DID know it, but pretend they DIDN'T.pic.twitter.com/I4xXXT5M9G

— Talia Ilan ישראל לא נגישה (@taliailan)April 11, 2022

Ilan says the point of the exercise, like that of Duchen’s list before her, is to expose the hollowness of the most common excuse for not hiring women as conductors — that there simply aren’t enough good ones around. Clearly, that’s not true, and Ilan hopes the contrary evidence will help inspire people to demand more from orchestras in the way of gender equity.

“I cannot fight the organizations, the decision makers, the orchestra managers who are the power in the industry,” she told me. “But what I can do is get the public to put pressure on them.

“I would like people to call up their local orchestra and ask them, ‘How come you don’t invite even one woman conductor in your entire season?'”

It’s a rhetorical question in Ilan’s framing, but also a good one. Whyis这样的女性领导的阻力podium?

One answer, obviously, lies in the word “leadership,” and makes this an analogous situation to the resistance to women in the corporate boardroom, in politics or in positions of civic power. One major part of a conductor’s job is telling people what to do, and there are still all too many men for whom that’s a problem. (Conductors do more collaborating and less bossing now than they did 30 or 50 years ago, but the basic point still stands.)

As recently as 2013, when the American conductor Marin Alsop became the first woman to conduct the high-profile last night of the Proms concert series in London, a handful of male conductors took it upon themselves to cast doubt on the proposition that women could lead an orchestra at all. One of them, Yuri Temirkanov, had seen Alsop succeed him as music director of the Baltimore Symphony, a fact that evidently gave him no inclination to revise his troglodytic worldview — although he did beat a partial tactical retreatin an interviewa few years later with Tim Smith of the Baltimore Sun.

Another hindrance to progress on this front is the broader resistance within the classical music world to change ofany排序。承诺做事情还是一样ey’ve always been done runs very deep, and works to inhibit all kinds of beneficial change.

Ilan subscribes to a mathematical explanation as well. If we assume that conducting talent is evenly distributed throughout the population, she points out, then an all-male profession makes space for the weakest 50% of men, who would be squeezed out of a workforce that was half female. That’s a lot of mediocre men with an incentive to oppose gender equity.

Whatever the cause (or combination of causes), two things are perfectly clear. One is that genuine progress is being made. More women are pursuing conducting careers, and more are finding success in it, than ever before.

The other is that we still have a long way to go. Four out of five female guest conductors in a single month is a start, but it’s a small one. On the day when a development like that isn’t even worth commenting on, we can all relax a bit. But not until then.

San Francisco Symphony presents:

• Xian Zhang conducts music of Nokuthula Ngwenyama, Florence Price and Dvorák, with piano soloist Aaron Diehl. May 5-8.
• Karina Canellakis conducts music of Lili Boulanger, Strauss and Lutosławski, with cello soloist Alisa Weilerstein. May 13-15.
• Nathalie Stutzmann conducts music of Brahms and Tchaikovsky, with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. May 26-28.
• Ruth Reinhardt conducts music of Lotta Wennäkoski, Mason Bates and Dvorák, with piano soloist Daniil Trifonov. June 2-5.
  

$35-$125. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-6000.www.sfsymphony.org