Gender and popular music policy

The popular music industries have significant problems when it comes to gender equality. There is now ample evidence that major barriers exist that prevent women and non-binary people from participating fully in almost all activities related to music-making (see Strong and Raine 2019 for an overview). In this chapter, we consider how cultural policy approaches have attempted to address this issue, and to what extent they have been successful, by comparing examples from the popular music industries in Sweden, the UK and Australia. We show that the wider national policy contexts of a country and the ways in which women, and music and the creative arts more broadly, have historically been included in policy considerations, leads to different expectations and outcomes for interventions in this area. We conclude with an examination of how policy responses to the Covid-19 crisis in 2020 may be shifting the ground on this issue.