On Friday, April 12, a crowd of thousands stood in the golden hour of the desert sun to watch Kacey Musgraves make her Coachella debut. The “Space Cowboy” singer strutted around the stage in a fiery red-orange fringe dress, instructing the crowd on the proper way to yee-haw. As she worked her way through a series of exuberant demonstrations, as she owned the stage and created a celebratory space — a rare woman in country music with the Coachella seal of approval — it felt like we were witnessing a moment.
During Kacey’s performance of “Rainbow,” a sad but hopeful song, my friend Alyssa, with whom I was watching the show, cried softly behind her sunglasses. “It just seems like this is such an important milestone for her career,” she said about the singer’s first-ever Coachella performance, wiping away her tears. “I just feel so proud of her!”
As the weekend progressed and I watched performers like Lizzo, Tierra Whack, Billie Eilish, Ella Mai, King Princess, H.E.R., and Ariana Grande, I realized what my friend meant: Music festivals are such big spaces that reflect so many cultural trends, and often these spaces feel overwhelmingly male. Despite the international stardom of the above women, despite what they created onstage, the majority of the acts at Coachella were men — even though 54% of attendees are female, according to one of Coachella’s cofounders; even though the music my female friends and I were most excited to see at the festival was made by women, whether or not the popular charts reflect our interests.
The discussion about men at festivals — being onstage, working on staff, or simply in the crowd — has been a source of contention in recent years due to predatory behavior by attendees and exclusionary practices that affect non-cishet men concertgoers. In that kind of climate, rife with harassment and discrimination, watching a powerful woman take ownership of a stage and create an experience, a cultural memory for people to celebrate — the way Beyoncé did with Beychella, for example — is radical.
Coachella, like numerous other music festivals, has consistently created musical lineups that nearly always feature more male musicians than female and nonbinary ones. In 2019, 35% of Coachella’s lineup was comprised of women-led acts (Coachella declined to comment on their lineup gender ratio for this article), the same percentage as in 2018, according to Book More Women, a viral Twitter account turned movement that raises awareness about the gender gap in festival list rosters.
Abbey Carbonneau started Book More Women in March 2018, after seeing lopsided lineups at other major festivals. She re-shared lineup posters on Twitter that had been visually altered so that all the male acts were removed from the picture.
The gender disparity is consistent across major U.S. festivals from Lollapalooza to Bonnaroo and looks even worse when presented visually. The women and nonbinary people who remain after the removal of men look lonely on the page, scattered, surrounded by empty space.
