45 Festivals Pledged Gender-Balanced Line-Ups By 2022 And It’s Not Good Enough

We’ve reached a point where the music industry is more frequently and vocally being called out and held accountable for gender imbalance. While we’re still waiting for significant change to ripple through the male-dominated playing field – only 17 of the 86 awards at the Grammys went to women and Wireless only booked three women across it’s three day line up - there is a new initiative hoping to tackle the gender gap at festivals over the next few years.

It's called the International Keychange Initiative and has been launched by the PRS Foundation, a UK based funder of new music and talent development. The initiative intends to reach a 50/50 gender balance across festivals by 2022. 45 festivals and music industry conferences across the world have pledged to do so – 16 in England, two in Wales and one in Scotland, but is it really enough? Well, no. Not really.

READ MORE: 20 Years Of Jennifer Lopez Being Bloody Great

Keychange’s founding festival partners, Reeperbahn in Germany, Spain’s BIME, Iceland Airwaves, Way Out West, Musikcentrum Sweden, Tallin Music Week in Estonia, MUTEK in Canada and Brighton’s The Great Escape, proposed the commitment to gender balance within the industry and are joined by roughly a fifth of the number of similar events held in the UK alone each year, so we can't help but ask, what's the hold up? Because there are some line-ups still waiting to be confirmed and filled out for this year and yet the prospects for headliners that look as relatively female-forward as the likes of Bestival are pretty bleak.

It's baffling to think that there is an assumption, somewhere along the festival production line, that simply aren't enough women in music to take those slots - we see them online and listen to them on Spotify. We must be missing something because the annual game of 'spot the female headliner' is beyond tired now and while initiatives like keychange are a step in the right direction, they are sorely overdue and don't stand a chance of solving the problem alone. Not when just 45 festivals worldwide have signed up to a four year plan....

Here’s the full list of music festivals and conferences that have pledged to impose a gender balance in the next four years, and yes, some of the biggest and most commercially celebrated festivals over here in the UK are notably missing from the list:

53 Degrees North (England),

Aldeburgh Festival (England),

Blissfields (England),

Bluedot (England),

orealis (Norway),

BreakOut West (Canada),

By (Norway),

Canadian Music Week (Canada),

Cheltenham Jazz Festival (England),

Cheltenham Music Festival (England),

Eurosonic Noorderslag (Netherlands),

FOCUS Wales (Wales),

Granada Experience (Spain),

Hard Working Class Heroes (Ireland),

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (England),

A2IM Indie Week (USA),

BBC Music Introducing Stages (UK),

Katowice JazzArt Festival (Poland),

Kendal Calling (England),

Liverpool International Music Festival (England),

Liverpool Sound City (England),

Manchester Jazz Festival (England),

Midem (France),

Norwich Sound and Vision (England),

North By North East (Canada),

NYC Winter Jazzfest (USA),

Off The Record (England),

Oslo World (Norway),

Pop-Kultur (Germany),

BBC Proms (England),

Roundhouse Rising (England),

Spitalfields Music (England),

Sŵn (Wales), Trondheim Calling (Norway),

Waves Vienna (Austria),

Westway LAB (Portugal),

Wide Days (Scotland),

Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide Festival (France)

Follow Jazmin on Instagram @JazKopotsha

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.