This paper examines the professional practices of women musicians in popular music in Switzerland. It shows that the few women who manage to survive in this line of work are bound to finding various forms of strategic arrangements with male dominance, ranging from a relationship of dependence (playing as a couple), embodying a motherly figure (being the "leader" of a band), or isolation (playing solo). When they try to address gender explicitly and assert themselves as women instrumentalists in an altogether male environment, or when they engage in strategies of subversion by playing with gender codes and appearances, women musicians are marginalized in their professional space, except in some rare cases where the strategic use of a sexualized femininity results in a very ambivalent form of "empowerment."