Last year, there was a campaign by Crack in the Road. They took that year\u2019s major UK festival lineup posters and removed any all-male bands, leaving just a tiny minority of female-inclusive bands. This year, Emily Eavis stated that there would be a lineup \u201cstrong on women\u201d at Glastonbury Festival 2016. If anything shows that the issue of gender bias is getting into the mainstream, it\u2019s this, but what has Glastonbury Festival’s gender bias looked like over the years?<\/p>\n
Glastonbury Festival is one of the most diverse festivals in the world, so surely they must represent the forefront of equality in music? I took a look at the gender balance in the artists playing Glastonbury to examine Glastonbury Festival’s gender bias issue.<\/p>\n
I took lineup posters from Glastonbury in five-year intervals from 1995 to 2015 and applied the same criteria Crack in The Road did in their campaign to examine\u00a0Glastonbury Festival’s gender bias.\u00a0What\u2019s really interesting is while the number of female-inclusive acts decreased from 2010-2015, the total number of female members of those bands increased. This suggests that the women playing Glastonbury Festival are clustering together more. Maybe this is a backlash against the fact that it is still way more difficult to be successful in the music industry as a woman, especially for women who are instrumentalists rather than vocalists.<\/p>\n
Recently, I have noticed a few examples of female artists who are really drawing attention to the issue of gender bias and trying to address it.\u00a0Savages<\/em> defy the expectations of what women in music usually look and sound like. They play punk rock, an otherwise male-dominated genre, and look and dress very differently to a lot of women in music. Savages<\/em> generally wear monochrome clothing, which is somewhat different to the colourful and revealing dress most female pop artists adopt.<\/p>\n BBC show \u2018Whatever Happened to Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll<\/a>\u2019 featured Savages\u2019 singer Jehnny Beth talking about the issue of sexism in music and the assumptions made of all-female bands. She said: \u201cThe easy thing people assume of us, because we\u2019re a band of women, is that we\u2019re a feminist band.” Given that all-female bands are still so rare, maybe people assume they must be making a statement about feminism.<\/p>\n Whether or not you like her music, you have to respect Charli XCX, a pop singer\/songwriter who is very successful with her own music and writes for other artists. Since playing Glastonbury Festival last year with her all-female band, she has used her success to increase awareness around the issue of gender bias, presenting \u2018The F Word and Me\u2019, a documentary about being a woman in music.<\/p>\n Another example is Adele, who has achieved enormous fame, wealth and this year became the first female to be booked to headline Glastonbury Festival this century. So even if the number of women at Glastonbury this year has not significantly increased, they do seem to be occupying higher profile slots. This is a step forward for\u00a0Glastonbury Festival’s gender bias.<\/p>\n It starts to look like the music industry is such a sexist place that it does not include enough women to make a natural change in its gender equality. However, tables are slowly beginning to turn: there has been a small increase in female artists at Glastonbury in recent years and more people are talking about the issue and beginning to take action on it.<\/p>\n The pace of change could increase due to the efforts of people like Emily Eavis, but it\u2019s hard to imagine it would be that easy, otherwise why has it not happened already? More likely, the change will need support from bigger institutions. If female musicians are being put off music as a career because it is so hard to be a success, then maybe there needs to be more encouragement at an educational level. It\u2019s this kind of grassroots action that could make the real difference to the music industry\u2019s gender balance.<\/p>\n In the near-future, Glastonbury Festival will probably see changes similar to those of the past 6 years, thanks to awareness-raising by a combination of strong female role models (Savages, Charli XCX and Adele), Crack in The Road\u2019s festival posters and media discussion of the issue of gender bias in music. Once there are sufficient numbers of women in music, this change should become self-sustaining because of the perception of better gender equality in music, and the change may even accelerate.<\/p>\n Since starting this article, the initial lineup poster for Glastonbury 2016<\/a> has been released and Crack in The Road have again removed the all-male bands, showing a still considerable minority of female-inclusive acts. There has been a slight increase since last year, but a closer examination shows the bands listed containing more women overall. So there is a bigger increase in female presence at Glastonbury this year than is immediately obvious.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s hope that if we revisit this subject in another 10 years, the gender bias in music will be much less of an issue that it still is today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last year, there was a campaign by Crack in the Road. They took that year\u2019s major UK festival lineup posters and removed any all-male bands, leaving just a tiny minority of female-inclusive bands. This year, Emily Eavis stated that there would be a lineup \u201cstrong on women\u201d at Glastonbury Festival 2016. If anything shows that the issue of gender bias is getting into the mainstream, it\u2019s this, but what has Glastonbury Festival’s gender bias looked like over the years?Women occupy higher profile slots<\/h5>\n
What about Glastonbury Festival 2016?<\/h5>\n
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":162,"featured_media":14162,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[140],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockhaq.com\/1546951672250\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockhaq.com\/1546951672250\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockhaq.com\/1546951672250\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockhaq.com\/1546951672250\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/162"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockhaq.com\/1546951672250\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13985"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/rockhaq.com\/1546951672250\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14163,"href":"https:\/\/rockhaq.com\/1546951672250\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13985\/revisions\/14163"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockhaq.com\/1546951672250\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockhaq.com\/1546951672250\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockhaq.com\/1546951672250\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockhaq.com\/1546951672250\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}