Don't Be a Sexist Promoter.


It wasn’t until I posted a tweet to advertise the next two months’ Mostly Comedy line-ups that I realised the acts appearing were all men.


I’m annoyed about this, if I’m honest, as I try hard not to make this the case. There should always be an equal spread of male and female comics, though admittedly, however aware I am of this, sometimes acts’ availabilities mean the line-up I aim for may not be the line-up I get. However good our intentions may be, we ultimately want a bill that will sell, plus we reach a point where we just need a bill confirmed.

It’s not that I want to go down the same route the BBC famously – and controversially – went with panel shows, insisting that every show should have at least one woman in the line-up. If anything, this made their male-to-female ratio worse, with them settling for just one woman per show, instead of an even amount. Also, why make panel shows the scapegoat, when male bias is a problem across the board, with too few dramas with strong female characters, and with men dominating just about every other field of entertainment too. It’s a deep-seated problem across all walks of life in fact, not just in television.

Looking back on the rest of the year’s Mostly line-ups, the statistics are reasonable, but not great; from January to July we’ve had eight women and fourteen men on the bil. I’ll do my best to rectify this as the year goes on, though however hard I try, if a high profile act says yes to the gig, we’ll always book them over a lesser one. Sadly, that’s business, though I’ll try to even the field by approaching more women than men in the first place (like I do in my private life).

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