UK Festivals: Only 13 percent of headliners are female, according to reports

Only one in ten headliners at the UK’s top music festivals this summer will be a woman.

Of 200 headline acts, a YouGov poll found that 26 were female, one identified as non-binary, 24 had a mixed cast of male and female performers, and the remainder (149) were either an all-male band or male solo -Artists.

That means only 13 per cent of this summer’s UK headliners will be female musicians, a BBC study has found.

This year’s Glastonbury headliners are Paul McCartney, Kendrick Lamar and Billie Eilish.

Reading and Leeds festival headliners include Arctic Monkeys, Rage Against The Machine, Dave, Bring Me The Horizon, Halsey and Megan Thee Stallion

Latitude festival headliners are all male: Lewis Capaldi, Foals and Snow Patrol.

George Ezra, Disclosure and Kings of Leon are headlining this year’s Boardmasters Festival, which is another mostly male lineup.

Surprisingly, the Wireless festival’s headliners are all American artists: SZA, Cardi B and Nicki Minaj. This is an improvement over Wireless’ 2021 lineup, which only featured four female artists, none of whom were headlining.

Last year, singer Mahalia tweeted that Wireless’ lineup was a “penis fest.”.

Despite efforts from 45 events that have pledged to achieve 50/50 gender balance by 2022, festivals are still lagging behind.

Five years ago, Festival Republic launched the ReBalance project to address gender imbalance in the music industry.

Festival Republic executive director Melvin Benn said when the Rebalance initiative was launched in 2017: “Something needs to be done about gender equality in the music industry. It’s a broader problem that affects us (the live industry), but the solution isn’t just ours.

“I’ve made the decision to proactively change and work toward making that a non-issue in the future, and that’s what this project is about.”