My Big Fat Festival Gender Audit

London sunset over British Summer Time Festival, 13th July 2019

Regular readers of this blog will remember that, back in summer 2017, I got a bit obsessed with the whole issue of women and music festivals.

Not so much the issue of women and safety at music festivals (although, alas, that issue is always with us... including this summer) but with how few women get to headline, or play at all, at music festivals in the UK.

It all started with a very detailed investigative report that the BBC did into the lack of female festival headliners, and some cockwomble esque comments made a pundit on the BBC World Service in response to the reports findings.

I had a pretty intense time writing my response to the report for The F-Word, and I had a hard time letting the issue go afterwards. I just couldn't stop writing about it.

I think the comments that really stung were the ones suggesting that there simply aren't any women with a high enough profile to headline Glastonbury, which I still reckon is bollocks. Admittedly, Glastonbury currently has a crowd capacity of 203,000 people, but I think that may be part of the problem: It takes a special kind of festival to book both Kylie Minogue and Janet Jackson to play in 2019 and not have either of them headline the event.

This summer I decided that I wanted to re-visit the whole issue of women and music festivals. Not just women headliners, but - again - how many women get to play UK music festivals at all in comparison to men.

In short, I did a gender audit of 10 UK music festivals of varying sizes.

I will be publishing a piece next week which will explore my findings in more depth but, if you want to see the headline stats, you can read them in Sticks 'N' Strings issue 4, which will land in your inbox on Saturday morning. If you haven't already signed up and would like to, you can do so here.