Pledging Gender-Balanced Festival Lineups Is Like Putting a Band-Aid on a Bullet Wound
Structural inequities run deeper than the names published on a festival poster.
Photo: Getty Images
On Monday, 45 international music festivals publicly pledged to book gender-balanced lineups by the year 2022. The pledge was spearheaded by the UK’s PRS Foundation, whose new initiative, Keychange, aims to mitigate the music industry’s longstanding gender inequality problem by getting more women onto the lineups of music festivals and conferences. It’s a noble goal: Glance at a festival poster from anywhere in the world and you’re likely to see far more men than women, a phenomenon easily visualized by removing all the male acts from any Coachella poster. While Coachella doesn’t appear on the list of festivals promising gender-balanced bookings (the pledgers are mostly European, with only two American events among them), the gesture has the potential to influence other festivals with notoriously lopsided lineups. It is also, at best, a superficial response to the deeply entrenched problem of misogyny in the music industry: a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.
Soon after the press release about Keychange’s pledge went public, music journalists took umbrage with its framing—namely, the idea that it would take until 2022 for these festivals to find enough women artists to populate their balanced lineups. It’s as if women who make music were an as-yet-unperfected technology. “Why in the world should this take four years?” tweeted music critic Judy Berman. The proposed timeline baffles. With no reason given for the delay, Keychange’s promise of gender equality in four years’ time suggests that booking women is an undue burden on festivals, an unnatural process that can only be completed with years of concerted effort.
So long as major festivals are profit-seeking enterprises controlled by men, the goal of gender balance on their stages will align more neatly with “lean-in” feminism than holistic equality.
Keychange’s goal of “achieving or maintaining a 50/50 gender balance” across participating festivals also comes loaded with a troubling presumption: that artists can be either men or women, and nothing else. The formulation leaves no room for the many non-binary and gender non-conforming artists active in contemporary music, among them festival favorites like Shamir and Sam Smith. Where does an artist like Ezra Furman, who identifies as a “feminine-representing bisexual male,” fall on Keychange’s gender split? Or a producer like Sophie, who for many years was assumed to be a man and identifies herself, simply, as Sophie? These artists (and many others) make rich, challenging music about their position outside the binary. To group them under “women” or “men” — or to clumsily expand the first category to “women, trans, and non-binary artists,” as Moogfest did late last year — flattens their experience and the art they make from it.