Hip-hop: Eve on five female MCs who changed the genre

Hip-hop can seem like a man's world, but women have been there from the start.

The infamous Bronx party that gave birth to the genre was organised by Cindy Campbell, a high school student who was trying to raise money for her back-to-school clothes. It was Cindy who wrote invitations on index cards and invited her brother Clive, aka DJ Kool Herc, to play the music.

Before long, former R&B singer Sylvia Robinson co-founded the world's first hip-hop label, Sugar Hill Records. Alongside landmark singles like Rapper's Delight, she also released one of the first all-female rap records, Funk You Up by The Sequence (featuring a then-unknown Angie Stone).

But as the genre became mainstream, pioneers like Roxanne Shanté, Kool Lady Rock and MC Sha-Rock were overshadowed by their male counterparts. The dawn of gangsta rap in the early 1990s turned hip-hop into even more of a boys club.