Jack White thinks female rock musicians have to work harder than men.

The 39-year-old rocker - who first found fame as a member of The White Stripes, a duo with his ex-wife and drummer Meg White - thinks women are dismissed as ''cute'' when they appear on stage playing an instrument.

He said: ''I know that when we had The White Stripes, the fact that Meg was female had something to do with people's perception of what was going on onstage.

''When you have all-female acts or female front people, there's a different perception. It's sort of a real shame that if a woman goes onstage with an instrument - a guitar or drums or something - that it's almost a novelty to people, like 'Oh isn't that cute?'

''The ultimate shame of it is that girls have to work twice as hard to really prove themselves.''

However, Jack thinks women can use this to their advantage because they work hard to be even better than male musicians in order to be taken seriously.

Speaking to Pearl Jam's Mike McCreedy in an interview which will air on the band's SiriusXM radio station in the US on Wednesday (08.10.14), he added: ''But in the end you get something better than any other run-of-the-mill male musician, because they're really putting it into proving what's going on there a lot of the time, because they're put in a position where they have to.''