While Adele may have sold all the albums in 2015 , it was not a particularly great year for women in music who were not named Adele. As a matter of fact, when you start breaking down the numbers of this year's Billboard charts, it was a terrible year for female artists.According to Fusion , when you look at this year's top 40 most popular artists on the "Billboard 100" — which looks at the 100 most popular songs on any given week — only 25.8% were female. This means outof the 178 songs in the Top 40 this year, only 25% were sung by female artists, such as Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, and Demi Lovato.Beyond that, if Fusion expands the criteria to include solo female artists and songs that feature at least one woman, it only adds an additional 20 songs to the total, or 11.23%. This means that songs featuring a female performer would only rise 13%, to a rather unremarkable 37%.While female artists were not very well represented on the charts this year, the amount of female songwriters in the Top 40 was less impressive still. Out of the 696 writers it took to create the 178 songs that made the Top 40, only 94 of them were women.