are there even historians who focus specifically on gender and women as they have with LGBT and minority studies?

I am so sorry you even have to ask this question. :( That's a really profound failure of the history education you've received in the past--and a failure of the historical profession overall.

Women's history--focused on women, thinking about women as women--was born in the 1960s, through the efforts of heroes like Gerda Lerner. Gender history, both in the sense of masculinity studies/studying men as men instead of as "people", and in the sense of the cultural discourse of gender/masculinity/femininity, came along later. There is an absolutely breathtaking amount of scholarship in both these subfields, although it's not evenly distributed across all area/era concentrations. I'm a medieval social/cultural historian, and women's history has a very strong presence. I see a lot less of it when I cheat on the Middle Ages with the Reformation.

However, there is absolutely still what we call a "gender ghetto" in regards to overall historical narratives. Women's history gets compartmentalized rather than integrated. Although there are some really famous exceptions--Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast is the golden exemplar--historians of women and gender are over on one side rewriting history while mainstream ("malestream," says Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza) historians kind of blink and ignore it.

You can even go so far as Norman Cantor's hotly debated "who's who" of early/mid 20th century medieval history, where he singles out Beryl Smalley as his Princess Tokenfemale...praising her for being a woman who rises above studying women.

To be clear, I'm not talking about women's history just being "and there were queens, too!" The promise and results of women's and gender history are that focusing on women/gender fundamentally change how we understand the course of history overall.

I've written a few posts for AskHistorians in the past about women's history (and occasionally gender history, though my personal focus is on integrating women into broader historical narratives rather than discourses of masculinity, femininity, and trans/genderbending). I hope you'll check some of them out:

• How can studying women reshape our ideas of history/what the past looks like overall?
• The above has a follow-up answer on the difference between women's history and gender history
• The terms "women's history", "feminist history", and "history of women"
• A history of women's history

I've also discussed the problems with talking about women and women's history on reddit, and how that interacts with the problem of being a woman/women's historian on AH.

I also compiled a wonderful linkspam post last autumn of some excellent AskHistorians answers about women. It's not longer because reddit has a 10,000 character per post limit. ;)

I've not answered your other questions because I'm kind of an outlier here--although I wouldn't really be considered a women's historian in/by academia, my PhD diss (and overall research interests, for that matter) centers on studying women and men writers side by side to tell a broader story, so I am all up in studies of women and women's history. (That is, my research is not meant to say something "about women" first and foremost; it is meant to say something "about the late Middle Ages" in its top-level concern. You'll find something similar with /u/chocolatepot, whose research is meant to talk "about fashion" but who talks quite a lot about women, men, and gender along the way; or /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov, whose research is meant to talk "about dueling" but who talks a lot about men and masculinity).

This also means a high proportion of my authors are women. :D (But see also: gender ghetto). However, also as temporarily a 'professional' historian, it's my job to know all the top scholarship in the field more broadly, women and men. I think I can do a pretty good job of naming a woman scholar in most topics I read about more than just "oh, the title of this article sounds cool," but this is more by accident than intention.

The one place I really struggle is finding women authors of popular history (beyond the Tudors, where there are several major ones) to recommend to people on AH and in casual conversation.

In terms of 20th century pop music, broadly speaking, pop music has long been a heavily male-dominated enterprise (despite that the average pop fan is usually implicitly gendered female), and not necessarily an enlightened one on the topic of gender. Additionally pop music in the second half of the 20th century was dominated by a rock music aesthetic which had a lot of things about it that were implicitly gendered male - I mean, the phallic overtones of the electric guitar is not exactly breaking news by any stretch of the imagination.

All of this means that, broadly speaking, there are probably more 'serious' books about the Beatles - biographies, analyses, etc - than there are about female pop artists in total. I inevitably own more books about the Beatles than about female pop artists. Put it this way: the journalist Jessica Hopper very pointedly titled a book of her writings about music as The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic. This book came out in 2015. And the reason for the word 'Living' in the title is, I think, largely because a collection of the music writing of the late Ellen Willis, Out Of The Vinyl Deeps, came out in 2011. There's been dozens of collections of the writings of critics like Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau, Richard Williams, Ian McDonald, Nick Kent, etc etc over the last half a century.

Broadly speaking, the way that gender has played out in pop music history has been discussed in academic literature at length since at least the 1980s, and I am across a bunch of that (I was very happy to find a second-hand copy of Gillian Gaar's She's A Rebel: The Secret History Of Women In Rock'n'Roll relatively recently, for example). I've certainly answered questions about significant women in pop music and largely feel comfortable doing so (I do try to be conscious of my implicit biases about things as a bloke, but I'm sure I don't always get it right).

I mean, in my latest answer (on Sam Cooke's death), I found the language used in Peter Guralnick's book Dream Boogie, my main source in answering the question, to be implicitly sexist in a bunch of ways when discussing Elisa Boyer (the woman Sam Cooke went home with on the night of his death). I very much noticed that Guralnick's language used in describing Elisa Boyer's description of what occurred that night was ambiguous about whether she was accusing Cooke of what we'd consider sexual assault in a #metoo world, and I ummed and ahhed about whether to straight out call it 'sexual assault' based on that information. I didn't, in the end, but maybe I should edit it.

But honestly, on /r/AskHistorians, I don't get that many questions about women musicians, or about more stereotypically female-oriented music. Reddit's prime demographic is of course young, male, and perhaps STEM-oriented, and their understanding of pop music's history is dominated by a particular view of rock history which implicitly foregrounds white heterosexual men. I generally quietly but firmly push back on that attitude when it raises its head, simply because its way of telling the narrative obscures the messier (and more female) reality.

Are we talking women contributors to historical scholarship or in historical female figures? I try to seek out the works of women contributors as much as I can, and I'd say the bulk of scholars I personally know in Early Modern drama studies are women -- this isn't to say that I've succeeded in engaging with the work of women like I ought to or that the field has reached any kind of parity, but women are doing a lot of great scholarship, sometimes focusing specifically on gender and sexuality and sometimes more generally. There's no deficit of excellent women scholars, but there's still issues in the field with sexism.

The historical material around Early Modern drama definitely skews toward the activities of men, or the sliver of Early Modern drama I focus on does anyway, but gender and women's history definitely isn't absent and there's plenty of material to read about vis-a-vis interesting Early Modern women and Early Modern ideas of manhood and womanhood that are anything but cut-and-dried. There's been more of an effort in recent years to excavate the presence of actual non-fictional women in Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, similar to a parallel movement to reassess the racial dynamics of the E/J theater -- even if women weren't onstage, that doesn't mean they were altogether absent from theater as an enterprise, or that they weren't in the intended audience. Gender as a general topic is definitely significant in the Early Modern era, especially on the stage, and I should be at least as familiar with the women of Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry and drama as I am with the dudes, even if the material describing their lives and work is often harder to get your hands on. (Again, not to say that I am equally familiar, but that I want to be and that I could be if I stepped up my game.) On the one hand, it might be trickier, but on the other it's still important. Gender and women are also stronger elements in Jesuit studies than one might expect from an all-dude religious order. Sometimes gender is at center stage -- Juan Miguel Marin writing about how the erotic elements in the writing of women mystics influenced the erotic elements in Jesuit mysticism, for instance, and how that maps across a gender divide while somehow staying homoerotic -- and sometimes it's more peripheral, but there's no shortage of stuff to talk about if someone were to ask the question "what role did women play in the early Society of Jesus?". (Except please don't ask that because I'm up to my ears in job stuff right now and can't form a thought to save my life.) Basically, you can write about any era through the lens of gender, which makes it pretty nifty, and I don't know if I'd say there's any historical era where the gender of a historical figure is entirely a moot point simply because every single culture and society has distinct gender roles and expectations. That doesn't mean that every scholar will talk about history through the lens of gender, or that they'll do it in the same way as one another, but there's a lot of women in history, forgotten and otherwise, and a lot of work being done to draw attention to their historical footprint. I don't know if any of this is making any sense, sorry!

My formal academic background is very dead-white-man oriented, but I've found there's a lot of good scholarship being done on history through the lens of gender in quite a few subject areas, even if in some areas knowledge of the significant women of a certain era isn't at the same level of accepted knowledge as the guys are. Gender in history by era/region is a perfectly legitimate academic specialization, and if you're interested both in a certain area of history and in understandings of gender it's a natural pairing. (Two great tastes that taste great together.) There are a couple flairs on AH who consistently put out great answers about historical women and gender issues, and who would almost certainly like to get to talk more about the achievements and presence of women in history; the questions asked on this subreddit sometimes skew more toward historical men as the default, but I'd encourage anyone who feels the urge to ask questions about women.

For what it's worth, however, sexism is specifically mentioned in the full rules under the heading of Civility: All users are expected to behave with courtesy and politeness at all times. We will not tolerate racism, sexism, or any other forms of bigotry. I'm not a mod by a long shot, but I've seen fairly vigorous screening and deletion of both comments and questions that fall in that category, and I'm pretty grateful for that.

The field of fashion history and fashion studies is a female-dominated one, which likely isn't a surprise given the extreme gendering of the concept of "fashion". I'll be honest - while I answer questions about men's fashion relatively frequently (to the extent that "frequent" can be applied to any of my answers), I don't ... really ... care ... about that to the same extent that I care about women's clothing, women's relationships to their clothing, and women involved in the fashion industry. In part, this is simple self-centeredness - I make historical clothing for myself to wear, and I want to make it correctly and try to get as close to an "authentic" experience as possible, plus I see myself in the historical women who made and wore this stuff - but it's also due to the simplification often done to the subject. Women's clothing in the Victorian period was bulky and hard to wear/move in, 1920s fashion represented a sudden break with the past, etc. You don't really see that very often with men's dress.

As someone with a terminal MA from a program focusing on fashion within a museum context, I have no rigorous grounding in theory. While I had great professors, gender in fashion was treated very basically, and we largely concentrated on concrete issues of "how to date clothing", "how to write a catalogue entry", "how to dress mannequins". So I can't really talk the proper theory talk. My road into talking about fashion and gender more critically started with seeing discrepancies between the standard narratives of fashion history and what I observed in primary sources - for instance, the idea that women's fashion has historically been about appealing to men sexually, and that men have "pushed" various fashions on women to keep them helpless. This would set me to look into primary sources more and more, as well as more recent secondary sources on related fashion topics, and draw logical connections between the things I was seeing.

I've also gotten into gender topics outside of my specialization. I will be honest again: I have always been interested in princesses and queens. I also used to read a lot of YA and fantasy and YA fantasy, where princesses were typically either "the popular girl from your high school" or "sad, forced to do nothing all day, considered basically worthless", which seemed wrong. My gateway into reading actual nonfiction complicating the positions of royal and elite women was Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette: The Journey, I think, and I haven't gone back. (Check out the Palgrave Macmillan "Queenship and Power" series if you're into this, too! It's so good.) And on another tack, similar stereotypes abound for middle-class women, who tend to be highly relevant to my day job - curator in a local history museum - so I've done a lot of exploring of gender in that context as well. All of this, and the above paragraphs, comes out pretty strongly in my profile, I think.