By Gabriella Steffenberg
Last week, Fusion reported that after studying the lineups of nine big music festivals in the U.S., they found that around 75% of this year’s acts are all male. As TeenVogue pointed out, this is a troubling statistic when half of the U.S. population is female.
Summer being peak time for festivals, TeenVogue looked at America’s biggest festival posters with only the all-female bands, or bands including one or more female members, present. The difference is plain to see: there is a stark emptiness in the Lollapolooza, The Governors Ball, and the Bonnaroo lineups.
A surprising statistic found by Fusion was that Coachella was the worst offender of them all when it came to male-dominated performances. A whopping 84% of the musical acts were all male, while 9% were all-female, and 7% featured bands with at least one woman. This is sad to see considering that Coachella is notoriously known for being one of the most popular music festivals to attend.
During our visit to Firefly at The Woodlands in Dover, Del., held June 18 – 21, we couldn’t help but notice the same thing. Take a look at the festival poster and see for yourself – Matt & Kim is the first name to appear on the list that has a woman in the band, and they’re in the 6th row. Out of the 120 bands on the Firefly lineup, only 27 had at least one female in the band, or were the solo act. That means that roughly 23% of the bands had females present, while the rest were all male.
Despite there being no shortage of recent releases by women in music, such as Florence + The Machine’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful; Ryn Weaver’s The Fool; and Kacey Musgraves’ Pageant Material, festivals simply don’t include as many women.
With all of the festival line-ups already scheduled, we’ll see if next year shows any improvement. Let’s make sure of it, because being a music lover isn’t gender-exclusive.
