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Still a rarity: women on festival stages, here guitarist Whitney Petty and singer Molly Sides from the band Thunderpussy
Photo: Mat Hayward/Getty Images
Complaints about how underrepresented women are on German festival stages have been heard and read several times;
Carolin Kebekus turned the tables in June and organized a festival in Cologne with an all-female lineup.
But the statistics are still clear, as a recent study shows.
According to a study by the MaLisa Foundation on gender equality in the music industry, the proportion of women on German festival stages is still less than 20 percent.
For the study, the line-ups of several festivals of different sizes in the years 2010, 2015, 2019 and 2022 were examined.
After all, according to the study, a slight increase in the proportion of women can be observed on the festival stages in the period under review.
In 2010, around 7 percent of the evaluated festival stages were female musicians, in 2019 there were just over 12 percent.
For the year 2022, which was also evaluated, a positive upward trend was observed with a proportion of women of 16 percent.
Smaller festivals in particular showed a clear improvement in the proportion of female musicians.
"The numbers are still a long way from a fair distribution," the study clearly states.
»Mostly men produce with men«
Even more impressive were the numbers collected for behind-the-scenes relationships in the area of songwriting.
According to the study, more than 85 percent of the music in the German charts is composed by men.
In the period under review, there was even an increase in the proportion of men: In the top 100 single charts in 2010, 86 percent of the authors were male, and in 2019 their proportion was even higher at 91 percent, according to the evaluation.
Purely female songwriting teams are an absolute rarity. In 2010 they were responsible for 3.3 percent of single hits, but in 2019 the proportion fell to 0.5 percent.
"Most of the time, men produce with men," is the summary of the authors of the study.
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Musician Furtwangler
Photo: Monika Skolimowska / picture alliance / dpa
Elisabeth Furtwängler, who founded the MaLisa Foundation with her mother Maria in 2016, said in an interview with the "Frankfurter Rundschau" about the study results: "The strongest barriers are in production." Women as singers are accepted and wanted.
"But the technical side, the production on the computer, the structure of a song, the manipulation of sounds and arrangements," complained men for themselves.
Elisabeth Furtwängler is a musician herself under the name Kerfor.
"It's very bad"
The copyright management company Gema cooperated with the foundation in the study.
Among other things, it provided data on the members.
Since 2019, 85 percent of Gema members have been male (2011: 86 percent).
Members who are involved in at least one work/song are almost 90 percent male over the period under review (2010: 88, 2015: 87, 2019: 86).
And a look at the songs registered with Gema shows an even greater imbalance: while the number of songs registered each year has increased significantly since 2010, the proportion of women involved has fallen from less than 9 percent in 2010 to 6 percent in 2019.
The study is to be presented on Thursday at the industry congress at the Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg.
Among other things, a panel discussion is planned with the title »The end of the buddy business?
Who is shaping the sound of the future?
In any case, study initiator Furtwängler finds the results “very crass”, the “extreme imbalance” can be seen in the charts, in works participation of reported songs and on festival stages.
She believes, »If you don't use quotas as part of the solution, then nothing changes.
It would move so much if there was a 50:50 ratio for the stations' playlists.«
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