In May 2022 we reported on the gender imbalance among headline performers at UK music festivals.
When the BBC first carried out similar research in 2017, it found 80% of the bill-topping acts at major festivals between the mid-1980s and that year had been male.
In 2022 the Shared Data Unit teamed up with Radio 1's Newsbeat and took a slightly-different approach - focussing not just on the top ten festivals in the UK, but the top 50.
The findings showed that little had changed despite a series of major campaigns to improve the split of main stage performers at the summer events.
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Only 13% of performers were found to be a female solo act or all-female band.
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While there was a small proportion of mixed-gender acts and one non-binary performer, all-male bands and solo artists occupied three quarters of the top billings.
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Half of all the festivals in the study had no female headliners on the bill.
US singer Maggie Rogers, whose hits include ‘Give a Little’ and ‘Alaska’, said the lack of female representation at festivals continued to be “horrifying” and urged festival directors to be bolder in their choice of headliners.
And Brit Award-winner Kate Nash said she was frustrated many continued to argue that it was difficult to book female acts in the top slots.
However, the chief executive of the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF) Paul Reed said it was unfair to blame the lack of balance on festival directors alone.
He said inequalities ran throughout the ‘talent pipeline’ and had as much to do with booking agents, promoters, music schools and gig operators.
This study looked at the headings used on festival posters across the UK. We chose the 50 festivals to use in our study from this YouGov poll and manually-entered the name, ages, gender and career length of every act in the largest font on each festival poster. More on the methodology, background and findings can be found here.
We produced this dataset with the details of every headline act at 50 festivals across the country as well as the event's location and capacity.
The story featured as a bulletin piece across local and national television and radio through 24 May, 2022 and a radio package aired at breakfast, midday and evening bulletins.
Paul Lynch from the team carried out two-way interviews on BBC Radio Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Derby, Gloucestershire, Hereford and Worcester, Humberside, Wiltshire, Berkshire, Cambridgeshire, Cumbria, Coventry and Warwickshire and West Midlands.
Paul also appeared on the Look East evening news while Mitch Mansfield, a colleague from Radio 1’s Newsbeat appeared, on the News Channel.
Special radio packages were made for Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, Radio Five Live, 6 Music and the World Service.
A number of our partner network used the story as well.
- Eastern Daily Press, No Girls Allowed: where are all the female festival headliners? 24 May 2022.
- Glasgow World, Festivals in Glasgow 2022: How many female headliners are there at your local music festival? 24 May 2022.
- The National Wales, Green Man and BBC 6 Music Festival booked almost no female headliners 24 May 2022.
- Suffolk News, No female acts headlining Suffolk's top festivals Latitude and Let's Rock as national figures show only one in ten headliners in 2022 will be women 24 May 2022.