It’s hard to pinpoint cause and effect, but in conversations with other female leaders in the classical sector, I’ve found that a number of us have noticed a creeping negative shift in attitudes towards women. Somehow the current political climate seems to have given permission for behaviours and attitudes that we thought we had seen the back of. A lack of respect; not being taken seriously; a low-level but deeply wearing sniping, or worse, at women in positions of authority.

Back in the summer of 2014, when Donald Trump was just a joke and Brexit meant … well, nothing at all, we noticed at Sound and Music, the national charity for new music, that our composer application data was telling us something important. At every single stage of development, from GCSE onwards, the gap between male and female applications widened – from 50% at GCSE level, to the 35% female applicants to our summer school, to the 25% female applicants to Sound and Music’s various professional artist development programmes.

I blogged about it at the time and we introduced clearer expectations for how we wanted to work with partners (no all-male programming in final performances, no all-male selection panels). It was revealing to see how this was received. In many cases it was welcomed, but it also led to some of the most difficult exchanges I’ve ever had in my professional career. This is a topic about which emotions run high and the punctum seems to be that giving consideration to gender when putting together a programme displaces the primary concern and responsibility of an artistic programmer, which have to be for artistic quality above all. Consciously including one or more works by women means that it is no longer just about the music.

This is an interesting one. It’s precisely because Sound and Music do care about quality that we care about this issue. If it’s agreed that talent is not more prevalent in one gender than another, then this falling away of women is a terrible waste and loss of unique musical voices. As the national development organisation for new music, we have to take this seriously.

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I also disagree with any implication that including work by women composers means that quality is compromised. I know that this isn’t what people consciously think. But unconscious bias is real and we are all dealing with it, all the time. Unconscious biases are at work when women composers are treated less seriously than their male counterparts and this treatment can take many forms, from asking questions about their personal lives rather than their music, to offering shorter or lighter commissions, or even (a real-life example) asking a famous female composer who had helped her with her orchestral piece, because she clearly couldn’t have done it all by herself.

And so, this week, to mark International Women’s Day, Sound and Music are announcing that by March 2020, at least 50% of the composers we work with will identify as women. Alongside our commitment to gender equality, we will increase the richness of content and visibility of women composers across our platforms and programmes, including our online living archive of 20th- and 21st-century British music, the British Music Collection.

The British Music Collection is an amazing resource, both in its physical form (at the University of Huddersfield) and online. Comprising information about composers, scores and recordings (and a growing repository of rich online content), it contains many fascinating discoveries and narratives. However, in its current form, it presents a history of 20th- and 21st-century music that is overwhelmingly male. Only 13% of the composers listed are women, and in many cases the data about them is sketchy.

The argument often made, of course, is that history is an effective filter for quality. Good work survives, less good work falls by the wayside. However, history can also be profoundly shaped by unconscious biases (or indeed more overt gender stereotyping, even plain old-fashioned sexism) at work over many generations. History is not a fixed reality, and canons are not set in stone.

Although Sound and Music’s commitment is about gender equality, it is also part and parcel of our widening perspectives and the desire and intention to diversify the range of artists we work with. We’re confident that working with a more representative group of composers leads to a more thrilling variety of new music, more artistic innovation and also, perhaps, a positive and constructive challenge to an industry that can sometimes fall back on traditional ideas of what, or rather who, constitutes a composer.

Tokenism is the opposite of what I’m interested in. There are now so many examples of artistic curiosity and thoughtfulness having led to unusual, distinctive programmes that – by the way – have better gender balance. But the important thing is that they present a range of interesting musical voices and can result in more enriching events. The very qualities that make for a brilliant artistic director – artistic curiosity, openness, judgment, an understanding of how music is experienced over time – also lead to the best kind of ways forward in how and why more female compositional voices can be heard.

•Susanna Eastburn is chief executive of Sound and Music, the national charity for new music in the UK.