by If you look backward through the history of rock ‘n’ roll, you’ll find that the ratio of women to men has always been, in a word, unbalanced.
At the time of this writing in 2025, less than 10 percent of the inductees in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame are women. But this should not lead one to believe that women — lots of them, in fact — were not then and still crucial to the development of the genre, including as drummers.
Drumming is arguably one of the more physically demanding roles in a rock band, but the idea that it couldn’t be done by a woman simply didn’t occur to a number of the female drummers you’ll find in the below gallery. Inspiration is inspiration, as far as Gina Schock, drummer for the Go-Go’s was concerned back when she was a kid idolizing the work of John Bonham, Charlie Watts and others.
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“I wanted to be up on that stage. I wanted to do what they did,” she told UCR in 2021. “Of course, I never thought about gender. Is it better to be a guy to be up onstage? Is it going to be a deficit being a woman getting up onstage? It’s weird, those things entered the picture many years later, but nonetheless that was a big part of what was happening during the ‘70s and ‘80s.”
Below, we’ve highlighted 16 of Rock’s Coolest Female Drummers who have been keeping the beat all these years.
16 of Rock’s Coolest Female Drummers
Hard-hitting women from multiple generations of rock ‘n’ roll.
Gallery Credit: Allison Rapp
