Emily Eavis says there are male execs in music industry who insist on speaking to her father

The Glastonbury festival organiser, Emily Eavis, has said some men in the music industry still refuse to deal with her despite her taking over responsibility from her father for overseeing the lineup.

Speaking days before the start of this year’s event, Eavis, 40, who has been booking acts at Glastonbury for half her life, said she was often the only woman in meetings with music moguls.

Some male executives still insisted on speaking to her father, Michael Eavis, 83, who co-created the festival at the family’s Worthy Farm in Somerset, she said.

“The live music world has been so male-dominated,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. “I go to meetings with just tables of men. Some were great, and some just refuse to accept that they had to deal with me.”

Eavis reaffirmed her aim of creating an equal gender balance of performers, after the Guardian revealed in 2015 that the lineup then was 86% male.

“We are working toward 50/50. Some years it’s 60/40. It’s a challenge for us and we’ve really taken it on and I’m always totally conscious every day that the gender balance should be right.”

She added: “Every day when I’m booking I’m thinking about that and cajoling stage bookers to be onboard with it. Some of them have been here a long time so it’s a little bit of hustle. But we’re getting there.”

Kylie Minogue, Miley Cyrus and Janet Jackson are among the big acts this year, alongside the Killers, the Cure and Stormzy.

Eavis has complained about sexism in the industry since she first started booking acts at one of the world’s largest music festivals.

Speaking to the Observer in 2009, she said: “People didn’t take it seriously coming from a girl, especially as not only was I a girl, but a ‘daughter of’ … but my dad has in no way given this to me in a nicely wrapped package. He has challenged me, made sure I can do it.”

Eavis also told Desert Island Discs her family were often the brunt of local anger at the festival when she was a child in the 1980s. “We used to have people shouting at us when we drove through the village. At the time it felt like we were part of something really controversial and everyone had an opinion, and they used to just let us know. You’d be at a Christmas drinks party and someone would just come over and start shouting.”

Eavis said she was not a fan of the festival as a child, and was troubled by the arrival of so many strangers on her family’s land. She said the event could be “pretty scary at times” during the early days.

• This article was amended on 24 June 2019 to correct the spelling of Kylie Minogue’s first name.