Even a quick scan through this year’s festival lineup posters reveals a gender imbalance, with female artists scarce among the larger font sizes. To look even deeper, we converted those lineups into data—logging the nearly 1,000 artists booked at 20 of this year’s biggest multi-genre festivals (primarily focusing on American fests) and ranking them according to their placement on each poster.

When we ran the numbers on music festivals last year, the gender disparity was glaring: Only a quarter of artists booked across 23 of the summer’s biggest fests were female or groups with at least one female member. Earlier this year, a group of 45, mostly non-U.S. festivals pledged to book gender-equal lineups by 2022. But where do we stand in 2018, and how much further do music festivals need to go to reach that goal?

Gender Balance

The charitable take on gender equality in the festival world is that it’s getting better. But it’s still got a long way to go. Based on the 19 fests we tracked in 2017 and 2018, female representation has increased from 14 to 19 percent, while the percentage of groups with at least one female or non-binary member, held relatively steady at 11 percent. Of course, that still means that seven out of 10 artists on festival bills are men or all-male bands.