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Some Music Festivals Balk at Booking 50% Female Acts. One Just Did It.

Fever Ray performing in February. In November the act will play the Iceland Airwaves Festival, which recently announced that half its acts will be women.Credit...Katerina Sulova/Czech News Agency, via Associated Press

An Icelandic music festival has become the first to meet a target ensuring half its acts are women — increasing pressure on the world’s biggest festivals to step up the number of women they book.

Iceland Airwaves, the country’s answer to South By Southwest, is one of 109 festivals that signed up in September to a global initiative called Keychange that aims to address gender inequality at such events. The festivals, which include one of Sweden’s largest, Way Out West, and the BBC Proms, which describes itself as the world’s largest classical music event, agreed to aim for gender parity by 2022.

The pledge came after years of complaints about the gender gap at festivals. Social media users have manipulated the posters of major festivals such as Coachella to show how few women were playing.

None of the world’s largest pop festivals — like Glastonbury in Britain and Roskilde in Denmark — signed up to the target, although some are supporting the campaign financially.

“We still have another round of acts to announce, but we’ll be over 50 percent,” Will Larnach-Jones, Iceland Airwaves’ head of operations, said in a telephone interview. Female acts already scheduled to play the event, which runs from Nov. 7 to Nov. 10, include the acclaimed electronic act Fever Ray and the American singer-songwriter Soccer Mommy, he said.

The festival’s staff kept the target at the back of their minds when booking acts, he added, but they had found it easy to meet. “It was almost back to front,” he said. “We looked at people we really liked, and then in meetings said, ‘Do we have enough?’ Happily we always did.”

“That shows you don’t have to try hard — there’s so many inspiring women around,” he added.

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Iceland Airwaves, however, has an easier job than other festivals, Mr. Larnach-Jones said. It is dedicated to new music, of all genres, whereas large festivals need established star names, meaning they have fewer women to choose from. But all festivals should be doing something positive on gender, he said.

Only four of the 24 acts that played Glastonbury’s main stage last year were female stars or female-fronted bands, while the pop star Dua Lipa was the only woman among Roskilde’s nine headline acts this year. In January, social media users in Britain highlighted the disparity at the urban music festival Wireless, where a 40-strong initial lineup included only three women.

Wireless’s organizers, Festival Republic, said in a statement that they had approached more female acts but some chose not to perform.

In June, Wireless announced an all-female stage in an effort to fill the gap. However, that was the initiative of the vodka brand Smirnoff, according to Rob Mathie, the founder of a communications agency that works with the brand. Smirnoff is running a marketing campaign focused around gender equality in music.

Europe’s largest festivals are unlikely to adopt the 50 percent target. A statement on Roskilde’s website says, “The balance is definitely off. Only 20 percent of live musical acts in Denmark are female.” Roskilde aims to change that not with quotas but by presenting inspiring “role models” on stage, like Beyoncé’s sister Solange, the statement adds.

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Soccer Mommy performing at South by Southwest on March 15. She will perform at Iceland Airwaves in November.Credit...Roger Kisby for The New York Times

Some 31 percent of the acts at the event this year were female or female-fronted.

“Glastonbury is an entirely different thing to the festivals that have signed up to the target,” said Emily Eavis, co-organizer of the Glastonbury festival and a Keychange ambassador, in a telephone interview. “I don’t think any large scale ones have, as it’s impossible to make a pledge like this.”

Large events rely on stadium-sized acts and there are only so many of these in the world — men or women, she said. They also have dozens of stages, with different bookers working on each. The whole industry needs to focus on developing women so the pool of acts gets wider, she added.

“It could be really, really easy to fill a quota if we just looked at small artists and put them on at five in the afternoon,” said Marta Pallarès, a spokeswoman for the Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona, Spain. “But we want to have women on every stage and every hour.”

The festival had a 50/50 gender split on its main stage this year, with acts like Björk playing headline slots, but women represented only 30 percent of acts across the festival as a whole. That was better than other Spanish festivals, she said, adding they average around 15 percent.

“There is a great deal of restraint against booking as many female acts as male acts,” Alexander Schulz, director of Germany’s Reeperbahn festival, said by email. “Even female bookers tell me that they are frightened of an economic failure for their festival if they would do so, because popular and well-selling acts out there in the market are mainly male.”

The Keychange initiative, which is backed by the European Union, was set up to develop female talent across the music industry. Mr. Schulz came up with the idea of a 50 percent target for festivals, although other events have adapted it to their circumstances.

The BBC Proms, for instance, has pledged to ensure half of the classical pieces it commissions each year are from female composers, but it does not have targets to achieve gender parity among its performers. Of all the composers whose music is being performed at the Proms this year, 18 percent are women.

If the 109 festivals that have signed up to the initiative succeed, Mr. Schulz expects larger festivals will join. “The reasons for excuses are getting shorter year by year,” he said.

One European music festival this summer will exceed all others in terms of the proportion of women playing. Sweden’s Statement festival, which runs from Aug. 31 through Sept. 1, will be, the organizers say, “the world’s first major music festival completely free from cis men,” by which they mean men who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. The event was set up in response to a wave of sexual assaults at Swedish music festivals.

“I’m really sorry we have to do this festival,” said Frida Christensen, who booked the acts playing, in a telephone interview. “I don’t think it’s a solution to divide society even more than it’s already divided. But that’s why it’s called Statement.”

She said the event was started to give women an event where they could feel safe, spur debate and, its organizers hope, to change the way some men act.

Many Swedish festivals are acting to try and tackle gender inequality, she added. The Swedish government’s performing arts agency even offers grants to help. But such initiatives should not be needed, she said.

“People shouldn’t even notice that a festival’s equal,” Ms. Christensen said. “It should just happen and everyone enjoys the music.”

A correction was made on 
July 27, 2018

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified a performer at a Fever Ray show. She was Helena Gutarra, not Karin Dreijer.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Ahead of the Gender Curve. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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