Let’s get everyone on stage: Voices of Gaia makes Keychange Pledge
The Green Gathering showcases an astounding range of performance and talent across intimate venues and wild outdoor stages, all solar-powered. With so much going on and so many exciting bookings being juggled, it would be easy to miss the mark on ensuring diversity and representation on stage, if we didn’t keep track and prioritise this.
For the last three years, our music and variety venues have worked towards achieving gender balance on stage through the Keychange Pledge.
Keychange is a Europe-wide initiative, a collective effort to change the landscape in which women represent only 20% of songwriters and composers, while earnings remain higher and opportunities greater for men.
The pledge is a simple one; it asks us to strive for gender balance amongst programmed acts, aiming to platform at least 50% women and other under-represented genders.
“I remain utterly outraged by the depressing statistics surrounding female representation in every aspect of the global music business. We absolutely and urgently must put it to rights. We are doing a great disservice, not only to women of all races and socio-economic backgrounds, but to all genders, culture, and society in general by allowing the status quo to continue.”
- Shirley Manson, frontwoman for Garbage and Ambassador for Keychange
Ellie Ulyatt, our Entertainments Coordinator, shifted the balance from 70:30 in 2019 to 50:50 at the very next Green Gathering - an incredible accomplishment.
In 2022, around half our acts included at least one woman, and two of our headliners were fronted by women. Last year, over half of our entire performance roster consisted of people of under-represented genders.
Now, our Voices of Gaia talkspace is signing up to mirror what our music and variety venues have done for gender diversity by taking the Keychange Pledge too.
Voices of Gaia provides a platform for practical diggers, visionary dreamers, philosophers and storytellers to share perspectives on realigning our lives with the natural environment to benefit people and planet, both physically and energetically. Ensuring this very special space features a diversity of voices is clearly the right thing to do.
Keychange's own next steps are to look more deeply at intersectionality and diversity other than gender, as well as widening the organisation’s international impact and rolling out the pledge, beyond music, to culture more widely. This is something we’re already pressing ahead with at Green Gathering – and we’ll have more exciting news about what we’re planning over the coming months.
As you probably know, at its core our festival is about sustainability. We believe that a sustainable future is a diverse and inclusive one. So if you’re tired of seeing the same people on stage at every festival, performance or gig, come along to The Green Gathering this summer. While we remain imperfect, we are on the way to having a more balanced programme, audience and crew – which makes us more resilient, and plenty more exciting too!
