Less than one per cent of dance music on the radio is made by women

Musicians of marginalised genders have only made up 13 per cent of festival headliners this year

Dance music that is made by women makes up less than one per cent of UK radio plays.

A new report, which examines the lack of gender diversity in the dance music industry, has concluded that songs created by female solo artists, or all-female bands, are significantly underrepresented on UK radio.

The study has also revealed a lack of representation in the dance charts, with women making up just five per cent of top hits.

However, songs that feature female vocalists make up as much as 44 per cent of dance music radio plays.

The results were shared by The Jaguar Foundation, which studied female and non-binary representation across the dance music scene between 2020 and 2021.

The Jaguar Foundation was set up by BBC Radio 1 DJ Jaguar, who currently hosts the BBC Introducing Dance show. Jaguar has championed diversity in the dance music scene and currently runs a programme to help get more young female, non-binary and trans artists to into DJing or producing.

She believes that this early encouragement is crucial to changing the story. "If I think about when I was at school, boys were always encouraged to do more technical things like music production," she told BBC News.

"As a result, there are more men in that field, so they managed to take over the scene and become the majority. So anyone who isn’t [a man] maybe feels shunned, doesn’t feel comfortable or doesn’t feel welcome."

The findings play into the wider issue of lack of representation for marginalised genders across the whole music scene.

In 2022, women still make up just 13 per cent of festival headliners.

With many initiatives and campaigns working to tackle the problem, things are marginally improving; the number of female line-ups across festival bills has doubled since 2018.

However this still only raises the numbers to 28 per cent, with the majority of this percentage playing smaller stages and earlier slots.