Yes. She sold around 130 million records. You can make the account yourself: Studio albums: 29,601,000; Compilation albums: 30,540,000; Physical singles: 51,320,000; Digital singles: 17,490,000. In total she sold: 128,951,000 records.

I couldn't delete the comment above. What happens is that I expected her sales to be much lower than Streisand's and the 130 million is closer than I expected. Anyway, it was a way of saying.

*fixing: and the 130 million is closer to Streisand sales than the amount that I expected.

Aretha is best example of sales are not everything. Her impact goes beyond it. The racism and boundaries she faced, her music stood the test of time. And is more remembered than some of pop stars you all stan like janet types. Aretha is the definition of impactful legent which u all use for every forgotten artist and their forgettable music.

Martin, would you say the Supremes sold more than Aretha did in the 60s? I know that they had massive success on the Billbaord charts during that decade, second only to The Beatles.

Of course by the 80's women weren't already on par with men, but the 80's were the decade of a great leap forward for female artists. Before the 80's I think that Carole King's Tapestry were the only female LP to have pass the 10 million pure sales threshold, while in the 80's you have the followinf albums above that threshold

True Blue, Like a Virgin, Like a Prayer, Whitney, Whitney Houston, Guilty, Private Dancer, Watermark, Rhythm Nation, Promise, Stronger than Pride, Tracy Chapman and She's so Unusual. So, while certainly by the 80's women still had a long way to go it was really the pivotal decade for them and it wasn't only Whitney and Madonna, they certainly were the leading female artists of that decade, but they were at the helm of a new generation of female artists who were finally taken seriously as album sellers and not just mere single sellers

But the OP asked when did female albums became "on par with men"...

A sales threshold like 10m isn't a great way to make comparisons btw because album sales kept growing over time, in the 90s they were 10 times bigger than in the 60s for example. Just looking at these year-end Billboard charts, there were actually 3 years in the 70s with multiple female albums in the top 5 (more than in the 80s), including this one :

1971
2 Carole King
3 Carpenters
4 Janis Joplin

And of course Americans didn't care much for ABBA, one of the biggest acts of the 70s.

No matter how ingeniously Aretha Franklin's record sales are shown and regardless of how many charts presented with various explanations, Franklin simply was not much of a seller worldwide. Yes, she sold in The United States rather well until she hit a null after "'Til You Come Back To Me" in 1974.

The "General Record Buying Public" never tool to Franklin the way they took to Ross. The critics loved Franklin because she sang, looked, acted and sounded like a White Person thought a Block person should and would.

Franklin was always about "Color" and was a prisoner of "Color"; Ross and Warwick were never prisoners of "Color" yet they represented their "Color" unmolested by what the "White World deemed acceptable for artists of "Color".