Sexism in indiepop band selection and Indietracks

Earlier today Daniel Novakovic and Jennifer Reiter posted an awesome blogpost on the So Tough So Cute blog about gender inequality of performers at Indietracks 2012.

Twitter erupted, Facebook erupted as band members and promoters denied their sexism. And cos Daniel and Jennifer had used statistics to make their argument it was all a great heap of awesome.

They had analysed the male/female/x make up of all the bands listed as performing at Indietracks 2012, then categorised the bands into being male, female or 50:50

This is how we counted performers at Indietracks. The process is based on the Ladyfest Malmö method.

• A female act is an act where the majority of band members are female
• A male act is an act where the majority of band members are male
• A 50/50 act is comprised of half females and half males or equal members of males, females and trans people

and with the help of lovely polkadot pie charts summarised the findings as

Summary:

• 56 acts were booked in total.
• 38 were male acts
• 7 were female acts
• 11 were 50/50-acts

Clearly since 51% of the population is female there must be sexism at work.


Similarly for individual performers at Indietracks 2012

• 159 were male
• 64 were female
• 3 trans or genderqueer.

It doesn't really represent the population.

But how badly should indiepop promoters feel about this? Is indiepop particularly sexist compared to other musical genres? I've always felt that indiepop is a broad musical church, inculsive of all genders and sexes. Compared to pop, punk, rock and metal, there are far more people in skirts in indiepop bands.

Anyhoo, So Tough! So Cute! only looked at the data for Indietracks 2012. Which could just be a blip, so I've poured over the old festival guides for Indietracks 2009, 2010 and 2011.


For performers, without investigating the privacies of trans and genderqueeriness

	2009	2010	2011	2012
Total female performers	75	58	59	64
Total male performers	138	143	120	159
%female performers	35.2%	28.9%	33.0%	28.7%
%male performers	64.8%	71.1%	67.0%	71.3%

Its roughly 70:30 male to female, how much variation were you expecting? About that much?

	2009	2010	2011	2012
Female bands	7	5	7	7
Male bands	40	43	35	38
50:50 bands	13	11	11	11

That is remarkably consistent, considering all the thousands of indiepop bands who could possibly play, more often than not there's always 7 female bands and 11 50:50 bands

Personally I think there's something a bit off about calling Allo Darlin' a male band, since without Elizabeth Morris, they wouldn't be half as successful.

So, as I have access to the raw data, we can categorised them differently, thus:-

	2009	2010	2011	2012
All male	19	17	17	15
Mixed mostly male	21	26	18	23
50:50 bands	13	11	11	11
Mixed mostly female	3	3	2	4
All female	4	2	5	3

Thrilling stuff that doesn't really change the argument much, except that if promoters were being sexist in their selections, there would perhaps be more 'All male' bands.

There are, of course, flaws in the methodology here. Flaws such as Dan and Jonny from Pocketbooks who as a mobile rhythm section play bass and drums in a couple of different bands, most of them featuring female members, when considering Indietracks, do Dan and Jonny only count once or multiple times or as fractions adding up to whole people. Likewise Remi from Electrophonvitage/Sunny Street and as a solo artist, the Colin Clary/Lets Whisper/Smittens, and Simon Love, cos he's worth ten normal men.

On the female side there's Emma from Knickers, Owl and Mouse and Darren Hayman's band who's trying to make up gender inequality single-handedly.

What's to do?

I can only propose that all women in general are forced to form bands and get on stage even if they don't want to.


Any musically talented women must join at least five bands.


I don't know.


UPDATE #1
As mentioned earlier the original piece didn't cover other music genres outwith indiepop, so I thought I'd venture into other worlds...
These are the details for The Didmarton Bluegrass Festival 2012

Total female performers	28
Total male performers	118
%female performers	19.18%
%male performers	80.82%

All male	19
Mixed mostly male	14
50:50 bands	5
Mixed mostly female	1
All female	3

So thats most imbalanced than Indietracks, with overwealmingly male bands.