If you are a person with eyes and a brain, it’s not terribly hard to notice that representation of women in music both in Australia and worldwide is in a pretty shithouse state. For a shockingly long time, music has largely been the purview of bands of three or four identical looking skinny white dudes, with female-fronted bands and female artists being passed over for shows and festival spots due to a super weird belief that they don’t sell tickets.
The stats are pretty unambiguous: women make up 50% of the population (slightly more in Europe and the Americas) but make up only a tiny fraction of the music industry. Either you believe that men are genetically predisposed to playing music and women aren’t (which is crazy), or you have to acknowledge that we have fostered a culture where women in music aren’t encouraged or engaged with the same way men are.
We’re so used to the idea of music being a male-dominated space that really doesn’t quite click just how bad the problem is until you see it laid out bare. This is where Lineups Without Males comes in, showing just how many gigs and festivals in Australia have either zero or scarily close to zero women.
As always with this sort of stuff, the shittiest people alive will pop up like some hellish version of Whac-A-Mole to insist that, actually, music is a meritocracy and all these all-male bands are chosen because they are legitimately the best, but that either means they just genuinely believe women inherently suck at music or there just aren’t enough women in music – the latter of which still means we have a huge problem to solve, that isn’t being fixed by just doing nothing.
You can check out the account right here, for now, I will leave you with this point very succinctly made by Camp Cope:
