“I’ve had so many issues with promoters who want to book you because ‘they need some female energy’,” she says. Hip hop artist Shay D, one of the acts performing in London tonight, says female performers are still treated as a “novelty” by promoters. You need to see it if you’re going to be it,” she says. “If you’re underrepresented in an industry, you’re going to feel like you have less reason to put yourself forward or less chance of getting support. “It’s a misrepresentation of our own identity, as we have a society where 50% of the population are women,” says Vanessa Reed, CEO of the PRS for Music Foundation, a leading music charity.
Of this summer’s festival headliners in the UK, eight out of 10 were male on the business side, just 30% of senior executive roles are occupied by women.Įmmy the Great: ‘You just have to battle through.’ Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer Predictably, this gender disparity is evident right up to the highest levels of the industry. “For women to achieve they have to go around that bump they have to be as good, if not better, than their male counterparts.” Or that I wasn’t encouraged as much to play the guitar as men,” says Marling. “In my experience there are surface visible things, like touring on my own and then realising that all the people I perform with are men.
“If you prevent women from seeing any examples of them achieving, then it prevents them from believing they can achieve it,” says guitarist and singer-songwriter Laura Marling, who addressed gender inequality and its effects in her podcast Reversal of the Muse. “But you just have to battle through that.”
Many shared anecdotes of the frustrations and vulnerabilities they’ve felt as female artists: “An old manager told me that he wouldn’t be sending out my music, he would just send out my photo to labels,” recalls writer and musician Emma-Lee Moss, known as Emmy the Great. Leading female musicians and industry figures say the intimidation and exclusion begins in childhood, with girls not being encouraged to play guitar or join bands.
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