SMILEfest 2015 - Music and Misogyny

Last week some of the biggest female names in music took to the stage to talk about the problems that women face in such a male dominated industry. NME’s Laura Snapes, Mute Press’ Zoe Miller, BBC Lives’ Mel Lewis and tour manager Tre Stead joined forces on Wednesday, March 11 for the second SMILEfest conference of 2015, entitled ‘Blurred Times: Music and Misogyny’.

One of the big hot topics at the moment is the Reading and Leeds line-up being only 10% female, and it is safe to say that all four of the guests were horrified at this statistic. Zoe believes that there are whole sections of the music industry that have a problem with the number of female acts, but other genres such as electronic music have many women in a position of power and strength. Laura believes that many of the males in the music industry are discriminating and not even realising that they are doing so.

Another shocking fact that was mentioned was that females who work in the music industry feel the need to dress down to escape their femininity so that they can be taken more seriously by men. Tre spent years wearing jeans and no make up to try and look like the rest of her male colleagues, but now wears what she wants as she feels more comfortable in her job. Zoe also mentioned when she has worked with female artists and they feel the need to dress down because of sexism.

All four of the females have experience sexism in the work place. Mel has been called patronising names, such as ‘babe’ and ‘darling’, Zoe mentioned that when males come into the office for meetings they direct their questions straight to the other male members of staff, Laura has been talked down to due to her gender and when Tre first starting working with bands people would assume she was a girlfriend or groupie.

Despite many horror stories being shared, one of the most important lessons to be gained from this conference was that women in the music industry stick together and that people will be there to help you out when you are faced with sexism in the work place.