FairPlé: The Festival Line-up Challenge

When FairPlé was established in 2018, one of the first things we looked at was the gender balance of Irish traditional and folk festival line-ups. These line-ups provide a useful snapshot into the progress towards gender balance on our stages and in our performance spaces. Please see below for our reports on festivals from January–June 2022, and June–December 2022. For more information on methodology, click the images below.

FairPlé Festival Line-Up Challenge June–December 2022.

It’s Festival Challenge time! Last year, we looked at the gender balance of Irish traditional and folk festival line-ups from January–June of 2022. Now check out part 2! Click on the image below to view our full report.*

*To download a plain text document of our report, click here.

This follow-on report looks at 40 folk and traditional festival events which took place from June-December of 2022. On average, women make up 36.2% of the performers and 27.6% of headline acts. From the information available, we did not identify any non-binary performers.

Although more work needs to be done, we are encouraged by the overall improvement in gender balance, and we can clearly see where some festivals have worked hard to improve their programming. However not every festival has got the message! To see how your favourite festival did, read on.

We have calculated the gender balances on these line-ups based on publicly available online information about the bands and acts. Where musicians have taken part in multiple events at a festival, they are counted only once. Where we have not been able to obtain details of any acts, we have noted that in our report. If you are able to provide details so that we can complete our data, please do contact us.

We have determined gender based on how people present or are presented, which is an imperfect method. We recognise the difference between someone's own gender identity and their public gender expression. This does mean that we may have made some errors and in particular, we may have misgendered people who identify as non-binary. If you believe that we have misgendered anyone in our reporting, please do let us know. We are very conscious that the statistics are very much on the binary and we are happy to correct any errors we may have made.

We recognise this is only one aspect of diversity, we acknowledge not everything is within control of festivals and we accept that many festivals are improving programming in other areas not covered here. We also stress that this work is being carried out by FairPlé on a voluntary basis, and lots more research, preferably by funded organisations/individuals, needs to be done.

Finally, we want to flag that these stats cover last year’s programming - many of these festivals have further improved the gender balance of their programmes for this year – many more however continue to stick to outdated, stale, lazy programming. Lots more to do!

FairPlé Festival Line-Up Challenge January–June 2022

Click on the image below to view our full report.

FairPlé was established in 2018 with the primary aim of addressing the lack of balance in gender representation in the Irish traditional and folk music scene. The global pandemic has given everyone time to reflect and reset. With the welcome return of live gigs and festivals, throughout 2022 FairPlé will be taking a look at how the festival line-ups are shaping up in terms of gender balance.

We know that festival programmers have been working to address gender balance and we can see that bands with women members are being booked. However, the statistics show us that there is a lot more work to do.

FairPlé is making a direct call out to all promoters, festival organisers and event programmers to make substantive gender balance a priority. There are plenty of amazing women, non-binary and gender-fluid artistes out there, but we are not getting to see or hear all of them. Details of many musicians can be found in our directory.

We are calling on festival funders and sponsors to take a proactive approach to the gender balance of the events you are supporting. At a minimum, all public funding should be conditional upon monitoring and reporting on gender balance of all aspects of the funded events.

There is no limit on the space in our tradition: there is room for everyone. It’s time to think differently: be creative. After everything that has happened over the last two years, why are we going back to old patterns and old rules?

The challenge is on. We have collated data on as many of the festivals within the traditional and folk music scene on the island of Ireland as possible. We hope that by the end of the year, we have good news.

A note on our methodology:

We have calculated the gender balances on these line-ups based on publicly available online information about the bands and acts. Where musicians have taken part in multiple events at a festival, they are counted only once. Where we have not been able to obtain details of any acts, we have noted that in our report – if you are able to provide details so that we can complete that data, please do contact us. If you believe that we have misgendered anyone in our reporting, in particular if we have overlooked any non-binary people, please do contact us and let us know.