Why Aren’t More Women Playing Music Festivals?

Rock n’ roll loves to think of itself as rebellious. But when it comes to gender, rock has a velvet rope, and women are still stuck outside.

At festival lineups and big venues, this is especially true. Women are vastly underrepresented — as openers and as headliners. In 2025, only 22% of acts in major festivals were women-led acts, according to figures published by Book More Women, an arts service organization.

Yet one doesn’t need a bunch of data to see there’s a problem. Just look at a lineup poster for national, state, and local community festivals. Women-fronted acts are there, but in smaller fonts, in earlier sets, and tucked underneath the big-fonted male-fronted acts, reinforcing the hierarchy of importance.

At both the smaller, state and community level and larger national level, this phenomenon is frequently waved away as a “pipeline” issue. Organizers say, “there just aren’t enough women” available. 

However, that argument doesn’t actually hold up. 

The reality is there are women in all genres of music ready for those stages, who are touring, writing, leading bands, and producing great records. They have built audiences. They do the work. Their product is just as valuable. Evidence suggests that female musicians might even work harder than their male counterparts. All in spite of the fact that, women are less likely to be signed, promoted, and supported by management, according to a 2023 Spotify-sponsored report.

Yet these festival organizers and booking people won’t acknowledge that the problem isn’t “the pipeline.” It’s the biased music industry feedback loops, the pervasive, fear-driven cycles where the same types of artists are given opportunities, over and over again. 

Festival organizers know that booking doesn’t happen in a vacuum: it’s built on relationships. The informal networks: Who have you played with? Who would recommend  you? Who vouches for you? Who invites you?  

Women are seen as unproven and risky because women are not in these “feedback loops.” A March 2021 research paper, “Break the Loop: Gender Imbalance in Music Recommenders,” coauthored by Andres Ferraro (Pandora-SiriusXM), Xavier Serra (Pompeu Fabra University), and Christine Bauer (University of Salzburg) explains this phenomenon:

“Recommender systems influence the products we buy, the news we read, or how we interact with others. The goal of a recommender system is to predict which items a user might like given the user’s previous ratings or interactions with items. This may lead to situations where users only see a narrow subset of the entire range of available recommendations. Users will respond to those recommendations, which will then be used as input for future recommendations; with this feedback loop, the recommender system will learn to recommend increasingly similar items.” 

When women do break through, they are often boxed into certain roles, less likely to be seen as an instrumentalist, producer, bandleader, or in charge. But the feedback loop of men supporting men (and this being a “safe” option) continues, as observed by authors of a January 2024 paper published by the Journal of World Music. 

Most recently, The Lunachicks discuss a version of this experience in their new documentary Pretty Ugly: The Untold Story of The Lunachicks when they’d been told, “No we can’t book another female band, we had one play last month.” The literal feedback loop of who recommends who is male-dominated and self-fulfilling, like a booking ouroboros.

There’s a bit of financial fear driving these loops. Because booking is a business, most bookers and promoters stick with the same networks that have made money in the past. The irony is that the musician with the highest-grossing tour of all time is a woman. Taylor Swift’s 2023-24 Eras Tour grossed more than $2 billion, a solid $500 million more than the next-highest tour (man band Coldplay, 2022-2025). And she only needed a couple of years (not three, like Coldplay) to rake in all that cash. 

So the “pipeline” isn’t empty: it’s just narrow and risk-averse. To make for a “safe” business in booking, it looks for what is known that works, and that means men. 

The exhaustion of trying to get booked as a woman for a coveted gig compounds the everyday stuff. Being underestimated. Being asked if you wrote your own songs. Being asked if you are there to “support your boyfriend at his show.” Being treated like the exception, or token, “female musician,” instead of just another musician. It adds up.

When it comes to booking, women get questioned more: about their skill, their draw, whether they can “carry” a show. Meanwhile, men are more likely to just be trusted to do these things, and forgiven if imperfectly executed as an exception to assumed competence, unlike women. Fewer bookings mean fewer chances. Fewer chances mean slower growth. That gets used as the reason to keep things exactly the same.

This creates a vicious competitive cycle where women feel they are competing against each other for coveted slots. 

The cycle, in turn, feeds the pressure to maintain the right “image.” Women in rock are forced to walk an impossible line, and speaking out about that scrutiny risks being labeled “bitchy” or ungrateful. 

Women of color, queer artists, and trans and nonbinary musicians often face even more gatekeeping than white women in rock, with fewer entry points and less industry backing. They’re more likely to be boxed into niche categories, and more likely to be seen as “hard to market.” When they do get booked, it’s often with the expectation of representing something larger than their music (e.g., “Pride Month”) rather than just being allowed to exist as artists on the main stages of mainstream festivals. The result is that the stages that are already missing women are even less reflective of the full range of people making rock music.

None of this is just about individual experiences. It’s a system. It’s about access. Visibility. Who gets the shot at festivals. Until the industry actually starts really looking outside its usual circles, that imbalance isn’t going anywhere.

The talent is already there. So while the system can’t change overnight, festival organizers need to make a conscious effort to be as inclusive as possible and look past the velvet rope. Cast a wider net. Staff committees for major festivals with multiple stakeholders to encourage better equity. Festivals such as the Hartbeat Festival in Hartford and the CT Folk Fest in my home state are making an effort to nudge the needle and diversify lineups. We should support these gatherings as much as possible.

If you’re an artist, especially if you are male, be rebellious! Advocate for change! Petition festivals to diversify talent and book more women and gender minorities. It can lead to meaningful change, as it did with the Vans Warped Tour, when Shiragirl crashed it, ultimately expanding opportunities for women in music.

Rock and roll is about rebellion and challenging the status quo. Booking more women is totally rock n’ roll — and awesome and rebellious. 

[SEE RELATED: Shira Yevin of Shiragirl Talks Gritty In Pink, Warped Tour, and the Power of Persistence]

Sarah Dunn is a musician, mom, and psychologist who lives in Connecticut with her chickens.