Only 10% of the headliners for TradFest Temple Bar 2022, are women and only 15% of headliners at the Doolin Folk Festival are women
This afternoon.
FairPlé analysed the line-ups of 16 festivals and concluded that, on average, women make up only 24.9% of the performers.
They write:
FairPlé is making a direct call out to all promoters, festival organisers and event programmers to make substantive gender balance a priority. There are plenty of amazing women, non-binary and gender-fluid artistes out there, but we are not getting to see or hear all of them. Details of many musicians can be found in our directory.
We are calling on festival funders and sponsors to take a proactive approach to the gender balance of the events you are supporting. At a minimum, all public funding should be conditional upon monitoring and reporting on gender balance of all aspects of the funded events.
Anyone?
The Festival Line-up Challenge (FairPlé)
do we know the process by which the acts are booked? That kind of transparency would show the balance of acts approached by the organisers or the acts that have approached the organisers for placement in an event. It would also show where the energy towards change should go eg. if less women/non-binary people etc are applying for the events then are there ways to encourage application? If there is discrimination, how is it removed?
Is it too late to book Imelda May?
It’s not long until June so I suppose may is out
wouldn’t blame women if they didn’t want to take part, most of those Trad dudes are lecherous creeps.
Some of them might be Trans Trad? I bet Clampers is planxtying it.
Jesus even trad has now contagions of Harvey Weinstein these days
God I miss the music scene of pre 2000
This will spur Colette Colfer to write another bloody awful poem…
Your obsessive jealously of Colette’s talent is something to behold.
It’s true, I just want to be able to write something as good as this – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFbHjBg8eVM
This trend is seen across the music industry as a whole. The vast majority of people perfoming in general are male. There are a huge number of women who work in other areas of the industry though.
Now, is it a naturally occurring phenomenon or is it something that’s occurring because of malice / sexism? Not sure.
I suspect the former. as I don’t know many men who wouldn’t be happy to be in the company of more women ;)
it’s the same in comedy. A friend of mine used to live with a promoter for a small comedy venue in London and for every 5 men they had enquiring about events, they had 1 woman (it varied year by year but the numbers generally worked out that way). Got a bit of guff from people about representation from a limited dataset and couldn’t do anything about it. They tried an open-mic comedy night that ended horribly.
If there was genuine malice or sexism, absolutely it should be shut down.
Well, Christopher Hitchens used to say that comedy is slanted towards men, as it’s an advantage for a man to be funny in order to attract a woman. (He obv got into a lot of trouble, with the flipside to that.)
He put forward the idea that men are already attractive to women in general, therefor a woman has to learn no additional skills in order to be attractive (in general) – but men certainly do, as women are the selectors in mating and we have to do our little display like a good little peacock and be chosen.
Now is it the same in music, is it a driver of more males to take up popular* musical instruments? – I don’t know.
But I can honestly say that one of the reasons I learned the guitar as a teenager was to (attempt to) attract de ladies… ;-)
__________________
*I say popular instruments, as there are of course thousands of successful women performing in orchestras across the world.
But I don’t think a lad playing the tuba or a French horn, has the same level of attractiveness to a lady as a bloke on a stage with a guitar.
Sandi Toksvig said something similar, that men appear funnier as they are more willing to make prats of themselves to get a laugh. Splaying our feathers and jumping about.
“more willing to make prats of themselves”
This is the way…
I have a good woman friend that works in comedy, and another that plays in both trad and orchestra settings and has done since youth, and let me tell you the amount of sexism they’ve both recounted to me, year on year, would make you depressed if you heard it.
The type that affects you socially outside of the music setting and in terms of your opportunities within that setting. In securing better positioning, scheduling, career opportunities etc etc etc.
Of course you would suspect that it’s just a coincidence and women don’t want to perform as much as men because “peacocks” (?) but you’re approaching it far too simplistically and naively and (typically for a man) in a way that paints your own gender in a favourable light.
It’s also funny that you think men put more effort into being attractive than women because that’s just shows how little attention you’ve ever paid to women.
One final point on this “popular instruments” thing you’ve mentioned, is that you aren’t thinking about it from an affirmative position, which is that the reason that these instruments are considered more ‘popular’ in the first place is that mens hobbies are put on a pedestal of respectability in comparison to womens.
Oh excellent.
A gay man to tell us all about women.
Please continue, I’ll make notes. I’m sure your insights into the fairer sex will be invaluable Oro.
Carry on…
Well tbph M, you don’t seem to have a notion about women, except to trust your own, really retro, unexamined views.
Secondly, what a weird homophobic reply. Also don’t forget, platonic love, purest of them all.
Looks like I got my pen and notebook out for nuttin
Shame if you find facts homophobic…
Just that I as a straight happily married father might have a teeny weeny bit more insight in how to make a women happy then your good self as a homosexual man.
Tis’ just a fact. Non O?
Well you didn’t engage with anything that I said except to make remarks about my identity, so yes that’s why I said it was homophobic. Funnily enough I wouldn’t be surprised if that tactic extends to how you deal with women ;)
It is not a fact that’s your opinion, which I would say is neither necessarily or generally true. Do read about platonic versus romantic love and consider the value in each.
Last thing I’d say is that statistics about which type of men make women happy aren’t as readily available as the kind of statistics about which type of man make women unhappy (or hurt or abused etc), and that’s your category.
I was in the changing room in the gym recently. All men. Not one woman to be seen. We need quotas people, and we need them fast!
Was that the mens changing room?
There’s more men into playing trad/folk then women. With pop you have the inverse. With the bands playing regular slots in pubs/venues they get a set session fee for a two hour session. The singer has to double up on guitar, there’s very few women that have a working knowledge of the tunes to do this.
As a rule women don’t look good with beards and wonderous Sandy Denny wasn’t available – as an aside why anyone would want on inflict Sharon Shannon on their eardrums is beyond my comprehension.
But, Sharon can smile while playing that accursed accordion, which is an extreme form of multitasking. Plus RTE seem to think that she’s the only female accordionist on earth.
I know it wouldn’t be an exact figure… but what is the % of male/female/Non-binary professional or semi-professional musicians in the state who would class themselves as band-members, singer song writers, or trad musicians?
Meanwhile on TG4 https://youtu.be/pTOd39107EY
Women singers have soul. Men have tousled hair, shaggy beards and hairy sweaty chests that make female fans swoon.
Trad music? Who cares?