Only 13 per cent of UK festival headliners are female, study finds
nme.comBBC Radio 1’s Newsbeat‘s key finding equates to only one in 10 headliners at leading 2022 UK music festivals being women, despite many events promising five years ago to achieve a ’50/50′ gender balance across their line-ups by this year.The new study focused on 50 of the biggest festivals, taken from a YouGov survey.Out of 200 headline acts it found that 26 (13 per cent) were an all-female band or a solo artist; 149 (74.5 per cent) were either an all-male band or a solo artist; 24 (12 per cent) had a mixed line-up of male and female performers, and one (0.05 per cent) artist identified as non-binary.In 2017, two projects were launched with the aim of securing more female and female-identifying acts on stages.
Festival Republic’s ReBalance and PRS’ KeyChange followed a previous BBC study that found that approximately 80 per cent of headliners were all-male.US singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers told Newsbeat in response to the new data: “It feels awful.“The music industry has been largely run and dominated by males since the beginning of time,” she said. “I’m sure that every female act can tell you a story of growing-up, walking into a guitar shop and just having your dreams crushed”.“It’s interesting, in a post-#MeToo era, because this imbalance is something we’ve had so much conversation about, but still in the music industry, [the proportion of women working in it] is a horrifying number.”But festival organisers have said that it’s unfair to point fingers at them alone for such disparity.
They highlighted that some progress has been made.London’s Wireless festival has three female headliners – SZA, Cardi B and Nicki Minaj – among a total of seven acts topping the bill.
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