Misogyny in Music report - Rebecca Lucy Taylor comment

31 January 2024 - Press release

Following the release of the Women and Equalities Committee’s Misogyny in Music report this week, Rebecca Lucy Taylor – Self Esteem – spoke with Nick Ahad on BBC Radio 4's Front Row about the report’s findings, her experiences with misogyny in the industry, and the experiences of the people around her. As a prominent voice on this matter in the landscape of UK music, and with fifteen years in the industry, Taylor built upon the conversation.

Taylor shared, “This report is quite exciting because I didn’t think in my lifetime I’d see any transparency about it”

“You are made to feel like you’re being over the top, too much, a princess, a diva. Now, me at 37, reading this report I’m going - well yeah, I feel validated”

She added, “I get rang about this time every year to talk about [why there aren’t] female headliners at festivals and I say the same thing about it every year which is - of course there isn’t. It takes a decade to have a career that means you could headline a festival, and most women quit because it’s such a dreadful environment, it’s an unsafe environment, it’s unregulated. Plenty of people just deploy logic and leave the industry”

“I could cry thinking about the women who haven’t been able to make music and say the things they’d like to say. We revere Bowie and The Beatles, there are so many women that were just as good, but they never got the chance”

On her own experiences she explained, “What I’ve seen in the last five years is an industry that is a bit frightened of me. They constantly say that I’m intimidating and stuff like that, that to me is a cop out and very boring, I want to be challenged just as much as a man would be you know. Equality is a long way away, but this is hopeful in the sense that it’s in the zeitgeist.”

Listen to the full interview HERE from 24:45.