Women and Equalities Committee
Oral evidence: Misogyny in music: follow up, HC 573
Tuesday 28 January 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 28 January 2025.
Members present: Sarah Owen (Chair); Alex Brewer; Rosie Duffield; Kirith Entwistle; Christine Jardine; Rachel Taylor.
Questions 1 - 56
Witnesses
I: Laura Snapes, Deputy Music Editor, The Guardian; Lucy Cox, Freelance Soprano Singer; Dr Charisse Beaumont, Chief Executive Officer, Black Lives in Music; Celeste Waite, Singer/Songwriter.
II: Deborah Annetts, Chief Executive Officer, Independent Society of Musicians (ISM); Jen Smith, Chief Executive Officer, Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority; Naomi Pohl, General Secretary, Musicians’ Union.
Witnesses: Laura Snapes, Lucy Cox, Dr Charisse Beaumont and Celeste Waite.
Q1 Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to the Women and Equalities Committee. Today we will be holding a follow-up session on misogyny in music. In our first panel we will be hearing from Laura Snapes, deputy music editor at The Guardian, she is on our screens just there; Lucy Cox, freelance soprano singer; Dr Charisse Beaumont, chief executive officer of Black Lives in Music; and Celeste Waite, singer-songwriter. Thank you very much for all joining us here. We are really grateful to have your experience, expertise, and knowledge. Thank you very much. I am going to start off.
Charisse and Laura, this Committee and our predecessors found it really difficult getting female artists to speak on record about their experiences in the music industry. Why do you think so few are willing to do so? Lucy, if you are happy to start, I will ask you first.
Lucy Cox: Yes. It is a very small world, and it has been normalised that misogyny and bullying are taking place in the industry all the time. When I first started singing, at one of my very early auditions I was told that I was going to have to wait for somebody to get pregnant or die before I would get any work. I later gave a performance that was attended by a man who was in a position of power. I was doing a solo, and I was really pleased because I thought I might get some work out of it. He asked me if I had performed a sex act on the conductor in order to get the solo. This sets the tone as to what is going on. When you are starting out in your 20s and that is what is normal, it becomes very difficult to challenge it because everybody is laughing about it. You find yourself laughing along, and then you are complicit, and suddenly it becomes impossible to speak out.
Q2 Chair: Lucy, thank you for sharing that, and I am sorry you experienced that. I would imagine you are not alone in experiencing that sort of pressure.
Lucy Cox: No. I put a call out to other women working in the classical music industry, mostly singers, and I had a lot of responses, some of which were very familiar to me, echoing my own experiences. While it is not spoken about a lot, it does not at all mean that it is not happening.
Dr Beaumont: What I said to your predecessors is that when people feel uneasy about speaking out, it is because they have a lot to risk. They have to risk their careers, their reputation and their mortgages on their house; they will lose gigs, work and their family in some cases. Why risk everything when you may not be believed? This is the root of what we are saying here about reporting.
We did a piece of research called Your Safety, Your Say to gather the stories of victims of bullying and harassment, and we gathered over 300 stories. What we found with regard to reporting and speaking about it is that most of the people we speak with confide in friends and family. Only 29% of people actually make an official report. Unfortunately, in many cases, those who have made a report find it negatively impacts their career. What is worse is 13% say they see no action. That lines up with what is in the Musicians’ Union’s report about bullying and harassment. As Lucy shared here, in most instances the perpetrators are protected. In many cases, because they are protected they are able to continue their harmful behaviour. Only a small number of reports lead to any real action. People feel when incidents happen, action should be taken.
Q3 Chair: Laura, I am sure that perhaps people may confide in you as well. To what extent are sexual harassment and bullying still seen as normalised parts of the working culture in the music industry?
Laura Snapes: They are entirely normalised but not necessarily in a way in which there is a tacit acceptance that it is just something you do and get away with. It is perhaps more endemic to how so much business is done and how relationships are structured. Often, bullying and harassment happen in isolated situations, like between a musician and a producer or in a backstage area. It is not like something is happening in your office and all your colleagues witness it. If someone complains about something that has happened behind closed doors, it can easily be dismissed as a misunderstanding or chalked up to tricky interpersonal relations, or perhaps worse, the artist being difficult and not understanding how things work, which might then create further complications for them.
Just going back to the previous question, another reason why people do not speak out, especially in the more pop-leaning side of things, is that you might well be tied into a several-album contract with your label. If you make a fuss now and you still owe them three records to come, you do not know what that process is going to be like. You might not get the funding to make the record. You might not get the promotion that you deserve for it either. One good example is in 2018, Lily Allen alleged that an executive at her record label had tried to rape her and that she did not report the attack because she was worried that she would be seen as an unreliable witness. She said she subsequently turned down an opportunity at BBC Radio 1 because it would have put her in the same room as that man. She also alleged that the station then punished her for not participating by not giving her next single any airplay.
Also, what outsiders will readily see as bullying or harassment is the sort of thing that within record labels can be seen as simply doing business effectively. For example, criticising a woman’s appearance or instructing her on how to present herself more appealingly—as they may see it—might be viewed within a business as a pragmatic response to what it takes to succeed in the market, rather than coercion and sexual exploitation.
Q4 Chair: I just wanted to go back to something you said there about how business is done as usual. Can you explain a little more about that phrase? How is business done, or seen to be done, in the music industry?
Laura Snapes: To my last point, I was thinking specifically about image where a young woman is told, “You need to be sexier because that’s what’s going to succeed in the marketplace.” That is the sort of thing I meant. Also, if you think about the relationship between musicians and producers—who are nearly always men, fewer than 5% of producers in this country are female or non-binary—that relationship is often an experienced man who has lots of success under his belt being paired with a young woman who might be at the outset of her career. Because he has a proven success rate, it might be seen that whatever it takes to get the job done is fine. Especially when it comes to that particular role, there is a lot of tolerance for the cost of business. People might say, “Well, that’s just how it goes.”
Q5 Kirith Entwistle: My next question is for Celeste. In your experience, to what extent does the way in which the music industry works allow powerful men to pressure women not to speak out about their bad behaviour? Is it something that you are aware of? I might know the answer to that. If so, how does it happen?
Celeste Waite: First, it is important to make the point that it is not necessarily purposefully or intentionally set out in a way that allows people to have this kind of behaviour but it encourages people who already have ill intentions, whether that is in their personal or professional life, to see a system in which they are able to take advantage. I know there are some topics that you will go on to speak about, but what is most prevalent in the daily experience of being a female in the music industry is this idea of an ingrained bias, or even an unconscious, sexist bias. That comes from the rhetoric or interactions you might have with people on a daily or weekly basis. How much you might deal with that kind of behaviour really depends on your position and stature as a woman within your industry.
Q6 Kirith Entwistle: Are you saying that it depends on where you are in terms of the hierarchy within the industry?
Celeste Waite: All women will deal with it. There will almost be a scale of how much of it you might deal with and how much you have an awareness of being able to posture yourself in certain environments to be able to take a bit more of the power share for yourself. I can imagine what I might experience would be different to perhaps an artist who is on a global scale. For example, I know some close friends and peers, who are just starting out in music and emerging within their careers, experience things that I have not experienced. I have had the protection of already being established, and people are already aware that I have a voice to speak about these things.
Q7 Kirith Entwistle: What are some more common ways in which this poor behaviour occurs? Do certain settings pose more of a risk—for example, areas where alcohol and drugs are present? Laura, you alluded earlier to the idea of backstage and how business is not done in rooms and things like that; you have very different settings. Are there more common settings that allow for that sort of behaviour to occur?
Celeste Waite: Yes, the frequency of being in professional environments that are also sociable environments, like gigs. There are lots of other elements to those spaces. People know that it is wrong. They know physical and verbal abuse is wrong, they know grooming is wrong within those spaces, and we all have an awareness of that in society too. There are other quite damaging, perhaps even more damaging behaviours, maybe psychological abuse and certain behaviours and acts that are harder to detect.
They can fall into this grey area at times, especially when perhaps drugs and alcohol are present. Not everybody still engages in alcohol and drugs in the same way that people have the impression people did, maybe in the ’90s or the early 2000s. I do not drink, and a lot of my friends do not; I do not do all that. Again, those kinds of environments that have grey areas are allowing certain people to take advantage of people they can see are potentially more vulnerable.
Lucy Cox: Just speaking on the informality of the setup, you are often working with people who are friends. Sometimes it becomes very difficult because you know what people’s home lives are like, you know that the person who has done something is married, and you can see exactly what kind of impact a report would have on them if it were taken seriously. That is another thing that makes it very complicated to talk about these things.
Dr Beaumont: In terms of grey areas, there is the issue of intersectionality as well. Women of colour or people who are disabled get treated differently from other people which needs to be highlighted. Regarding settings, in our reporting we found a lot of the abuse tends to happen in studios and live settings as well: gigs, concerts, festivals. A lot of the abuse that happens is by somebody who is quite close, such as a manager or promoter. There is not really anywhere for people to go or call out. One of the aspects of being in that predicament, and what we are trying to drive home today, is where do people go when this happens? What is the end goal in terms of the pathways for people to see that these perpetrators are going to be brought to justice? That is not clearly defined.
Q8 Chair: Laura first, and then I am going to ask everybody else. I have a feeling I know the answer to the first half of this question, which is that the previous Committee heard witnesses say that the music industry had not yet had its MeToo moment. Why do you think that is? Do you think it ever will? What will it take for that to happen in the music industry, Laura?
Laura Snapes: It is important to focus on the fact that within film, Harvey Weinstein’s downfall was the result of household name celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow speaking out against a majorly influential figure and doing so to publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker that have the resources and legal wherewithal to be able to investigate a story like that. You cannot underestimate the amount of celebrity, journalistic and legal momentum required to make that kind of impact.
There have been big individual cases that have led to prosecution, or at least major reputational damage, like R. Kelly, P. Diddy and Tim Westwood. But it is notable in each one of those cases that the allegations had been swarming for years and years before they were properly investigated, which is also very easy to link to the fact that the alleged victims were predominantly young black women. You have to think about whose experiences are valued, what the so-called perfect victim looks like, and how that squares against what is likely a very, very low benefit of speaking out in the first place.
To keep thinking about there being some kind of future moment, as it were, is a bit distorting and distracting. This is an example in film again, but you only have to look at the Blake Lively case in the US, as well as the mainstreaming of misogynist views generally, to see the backlash to the MeToo movement and to the idea that alleged abusers should face consequences for wrongdoing, both within the entertainment industry and among sectors of the public. We are not going to get a moment in music, and we should not be waiting for one either. It is a little passive and maybe limited to perceive the problem as something that one day might explode, rather than as an ongoing process of ensuring safety and respect as well as appropriate consequences and justice for wrongdoing, which we could act on now. I can say how I think we might do that.
Q9 Chair: I would like you to because I agree with you that in terms of the film industry, the MeToo movement lifted the lid on things that everybody already knew about. In terms of justice, yes, there have been some perpetrators who have received justice, but I am sure there are many others who have just gone under the radar and continue to do so. It has not solved the problem of the structural inequalities within these industries. What do you think it would take for us to see more prosecutions of perpetrators and more safe spaces and support for people who are actually coming out against this kind of behaviour?
Laura Snapes: Prosecution is perhaps more of an issue for the Justice Department. Coming back to your very first question, probably one of the things that prevent women from speaking out is that you are more likely to get sued for defamation for doing so than to achieve any successful prosecution for the person you are speaking out against.
These are just some ideas in terms of creating a culture of safety: record labels should create codes of conduct to be signed by all parties on a project; HR departments need to be robust and ideally outsource difficult situations to independent bodies because we all know that HR departments tend to act in the interest of the business; labels need to prioritise equality at all levels of business, from the boardroom down to producers who, as I said, remain largely male, a role ripe for perpetuating abuse; recording sessions should always be recorded, just in case recourse to footage is required over any alleged incidents within the studio; section 14 of the Equality Act 2010 should be brought into force, and the Government should accept the recommendations of last year’s report.
Moreover, looking beyond music, the Government rejected the recommendations last year and pointed to the Equality Act and existing requirements and protections for any employers, but the reason these clearly are not effective requires looking beyond music. Misogyny is more of a societal plague than I can ever remember it being in my lifetime. Robust education for young people and young men on equality, respect, consent and debunking so-called gender norms about who is best suited to what kind of job has to happen in schools as a matter of urgency or nothing will ever change.
Lucy Cox: Without the need for a MeToo movement, everybody knows there are known perpetrators in the classical music industry. I had a woman write in describing an experience; I do not work with this woman, she is not a singer, but I was able to pinpoint who she was talking about because he had done exactly the same thing to me. At the moment, there is no incentive for these people not to behave like that. Nobody is holding them to account. There is no way of getting justice. As you say, you risk being sued if you start speaking out about people. It is very difficult to know how to avoid these situations and how to educate. Education is an excellent idea because these people do not know how to behave. They have no idea.
Q10 Chair: Is it that they do not know how to behave, or do they know that the behaviour is wrong, and they know they are going to get away with it?
Dr Beaumont: Absolutely, they are being enabled in so many different ways. There is structural facilitation. I agree with everything that Laura says, she has literally just taken all my notes in one go. If you look at the Cassie Ventura case against Sean Diddy Combs, it took for us to see a video to believe her when people need to be believed immediately. Those were her words: they should have believed her, “The first time.”
You have thousands of women, you have this panel, you have had loads of panels over the last year, thousands of pieces of evidence, women saying, “This is happening,” and it is being reported, yet we are not believed. The general sentiment for people who are in the industry reporting this is that there is frustration that we spoke and not enough is being done about bullying and harassment. All we have are these reports. Like you said, Lucy, the most common outcome is there is no action, or at worst there are personal penalties. People are taking a risk, and nothing is being done.
Q11 Chair: What would justice look like in that setup that you just explained, Lucy, to the person who is a perpetrator who has repeatedly behaved in that way? What would justice look like to you?
Lucy Cox: They should not be able to continue being in that position of authority and power. If they have proven again and again that they cannot be trusted and that they take advantage of situations to the detriment of the whole industry and to the woman who is suffering these experiences, then they should not be able to continue to work in that sector.
Q12 Rachel Taylor: Thank you all for speaking up and speaking out; it really is so important. With that in mind, I would like to ask Laura first: without giving any identifying details, are you aware of anyone in the music industry who has been pressured into signing a non-disclosure agreement, an NDA, to prevent them from talking about their experience of sexual misconduct or discrimination?
Laura Snapes: Yes, I am aware of several people who have signed NDAs of that nature.
Q13 Rachel Taylor: Several have signed them. Are you aware of that being a more widespread ask? Has everybody you are aware of who has been asked signed them or have some refused?
Laura Snapes: I cannot speak to the specificities of it, but I know that they are used in a very widespread way.
Dr Beaumont: In accordance with our research—I think this is a low number, since we are talking about NDAs—24% of the people who we spoke to said they have been pressured to sign an NDA. If that is reflected across the music industry, you are talking about a quarter of the music industry. I think that is being conservative if I am being honest.
Q14 Rachel Taylor: Charisse, the Government are considering banning the use of NDAs in circumstances involving harassment and abuse. Is that something you think people working in the music industry would support?
Dr Beaumont: Absolutely. NDAs are complicated, but where you are cloaking crime, NDAs should not be used. They are being misused to protect perpetrators. They have become a distrusted weapon and they have negative impacts, particularly when misused to suppress and shield misconduct and exploit power imbalances. NDAs ethically depend on the context and how they are implemented, but right now they allow the powerful people to bully, stifle and block the truth from being known. We need to look at all structures around abusers and give them no place to hide.
Celeste Waite: I agree that it is very important that they cannot be used to silence people when they have experienced some things that we have mentioned. Something that is important to add is some powerful individuals who have the confidence to know that they could potentially stifle you even without having you sign an NDA will exercise the use of the power they hold in whatever way they can. But it will help a lot to be able to do that.
Laura Snapes: I only want to add that it would be very helpful to ban them.
Q15 Rosie Duffield: In your experience, how much control do women in the music industry have over their appearance, image, and how they are marketed compared to men? I would be interested to hear particularly from Celeste and Lucy on that.
Celeste Waite: My experience of how much control I have over my image is different from other people’s because the way I dress and costume for my performances is very much a part of my expression. Another element to that is that fashion has been a really lucrative part of my career, and I have always taken the lead on that. Perhaps that is also where I have freedom with it because people can see it works for me in that way.
I know that other people’s experiences are a lot different. I have heard of girls being told to cover up because they do not look sophisticated enough if parts of their body are showing. I have also heard of people being given certain items of clothing by a stylist who is under the influence of people in a position of power around them, or perhaps people who may be funding some of that public appearance; they are not feeling very comfortable or content with the options they are given because they feel it is showing their body in a way they do not feel comfortable with. I have understood that to be the experience of other women within my industry, although it has not been my own.
Q16 Rosie Duffield: Lucy, would you say it is similar in the classical sector?
Lucy Cox: It is similar and different. The women certainly have much more prescriptive dress codes than men when they are doing big projects with lots of participants. The word sexy probably would not appear on a schedule, but I have worked for choirs where they specify that they prefer us to have a V-neck, which I find odd. Regarding being asked to cover up, not being allowed to have bare shoulders is something that comes up. I have also been asked by a man not to cross my legs, which again is not acceptable, is it?
Q17 Rosie Duffield: Thank you for being so honest. Dr Beaumont, you have previously published data showing that 70% of black women have felt the need to change something about themselves to be accepted in the industry, like lightening their skin. Do these pressures still exist today, and if so, can you explain why and how they can be tackled?
Dr Beaumont: Yes, I am going to speak to the image aspect of it because black women in music in particular are over-sexualised. When we look at the data, it shows that 42% of all women felt pressured to change their appearance to become more sexual and 25% were encouraged to act and dress in ways that were overly sexualised. We have some quotes from all women: “I’ve been told in order to be successful, I must make the men in power think I want them.” “I feel like if I have to sell records, I need to be talking about sex. Sex sells.” “Making you feel like money is more valuable than art, to dress different, to talk different and become more acceptable.”
However, when we speak to the black women in our community, many of the women that we survey and speak with believe that, as a community, black women are being sexualised and objectified, “The industry chooses to put most of its money into rappers and singers who feel they can portray an image that will bring down the black community. These artists’ lyrics are hypersexual.” “I feel like black creators are more supported if they push a self-destructive narrative. For example, black female artists, rappers in particular, speak more about overtly sexual topics and carrying themselves in the manner that brings them down.” “I wish that the music industry was not all about the visual aspect. At the moment, it is about music videos, the sexually abusive behaviour, and how sexy you are rather than the music.”
Laura spoke earlier about education, and educating children and young people about bullying and harassment and how to treat women. If kids on their mobile phones are constantly bombarded with sexual images of black women looking this way, what do you think is going to happen? Our data, the Musicians’ Union data, the Musicians’ Union census and Help Musicians’ data say that black women are bullied and sexually harassed more than any other group of people. There is a correlation; we are seeing something here. That is why something needs to be done. However, we are also the most likely to not be believed. It is important that there is a place for women to go to, and that is where we believe the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority will be an independent place, a safe space for black women and black people to fight against discrimination.
Q18 Chair: Charisse has talked about that intersectionality that black women face. Celeste, as a biracial woman in the industry, how does this affect you specifically?
Celeste Waite: I will start with my observations. Yes, I am biracial, I am Jamaican and British. I take note of these kinds of experiences that are playing out, and I acknowledge that my experiences are potentially different from a dark-skinned black woman, or a woman who, for example, has grown up in a different cultural setting. For myself, I grew up in a white working-class culture, and then where I later received my education, I suppose you could say more of a white middle-class culture. That allows me certain touch points with certain people within my industry where we can relate to one another. I can recognise some of my friends and some female musicians have grown up in slightly different circumstances that perhaps some individuals in the music industry are more removed from and have had less exposure to—if that is the correct terminology for it—or they have not had friendships or experiences with people from diverse ethnic backgrounds.
What I have seen is a portrayal of black women in the mainstream that is overtly sexualised. There perhaps is a pattern where the women who are getting the support and are able to reach this grand scale are the ones who take on this certain image. There is a toxic expectation around black women’s bodies which over time has progressed into women having to take on potentially dangerous and invasive surgical procedures or extreme beauty trends to achieve this image. I can imagine what also seeps in is this idea that you have ambition and there is something that you want but you are not able to reach it unless you take on some of this form that you see so commonly.
It is also linked to the fact that there is always a pressure for artists to take on or conform to the ideas within the mainstream. At some stage, there is always somebody who is a trailblazer and breaks the idea of what we see as what is working on a commercial scale. They then set the parameters for what could be five years, 10 years, or a couple of years until the next person comes along who has perhaps had the fortune and certain and specific advantages that allow them to be able to move through and navigate to that top position and make certain choices that their predecessors perhaps did not have the choice to make.
Regarding myself, I have always taken the decision that if I am to show my body in a way that feels sexualised, it is my choice. I feel I have been affected by social media with this, and it has affected my view and my gaze over myself on how I should dress. I do not actually know in my own case whether that is encouraged by my peers, or whether that is encouraged by my fan base even. I do not see more reaction in my fan base if I show more skin; I actually get less. It is dependent on the individual, but generally I see and feel that black women are in a position where there are expectations that are permeating their expression, past just their physical appearance. It is limiting what black artists feel they can do which is a shame because it is a voice that is very important in our society.
Dr Beaumont: You just said something that is really important with regard to your fan base and what they want and what you expect, and how when change yourself and are not authentic, you lose some of your fan base. In music, people generally like what they like, but the higher-ups—what we are talking about here—the actual industry manufactures content. Unfortunately, there are women and people who are being hurt by this. It is important that we celebrate and encourage artists out there who are genuine, who do not want to strip down to nothing, and who become great artists and contribute to the industry. But what the industry invests in are artists or black women whom they can over-sexualise. That is why we see so much of it.
Q19 Chair: One of the international examples of a really manufactured industry is K-pop. They do not hide it. It is almost like they are proud of it. They will hypersexualise or diminish, you have to be diminutive and strike that balance between wearing few clothes but not too few clothes, not being too sexualised but not being plain and boring, and there are the surgical procedures. They are really open about it. Is this what is happening with black women in the UK music industry, but it is just not open about it?
Dr Beaumont: Social media plays a huge part here. It is almost like the chicken and egg effect where women are being encouraged—as we see in the data—to have certain procedures done because that is the norm. Actually, when I think about it, before everybody started to have cosmetic surgeries, BBLs and everything else, we were seeing certain megastars having them first; I will not mention them because I respect them. When we saw those megastars, we were puzzled. Why do they look this way? Why do they look like Barbie dolls as black female artists? Bleached skin, massive bums, massive chests. Now we are seeing how that is impacting society, and we are seeing young girls being pressured to do that stuff, regardless of their background. That is how powerful and impactful the music industry is, and why we need to uncover it and clean it out and make some really good changes.
Q20 Rosie Duffield: Dr Beaumont, I have seen that you have done a lot of work on disability, and you touched on it earlier. How do you think that those other protected characteristics, such as race and disability, interact with the sexist discrimination in the music industry?
Dr Beaumont: They interact really badly. According to the Help Musicians Census, 23% of disabled musicians have been sexually harassed. Let that one sink in: 23%. Furthermore, 29% of all LGBTQ+ respondents have experienced sexual harassment and 24% of trans respondents have also been sexually harassed. This impacts their ability to work and their career progression. In our data, the numbers were slightly lower. However, when we are talking about mental health, 74% of LGBTQI artists sought counselling because of how they are being treated in the music industry, and 69% of those with disabilities sought counselling to try to protect their mental health. “It’s not a nice industry to be in if you’re not a white male.” I am sorry to say it like that. I did not say that, but it is one of the comments from our report. It interacts really badly when it comes to other protected characteristics.
Laura Snapes: I was not going to speak specifically to that, but I just wanted to come back to the image question for a second. I agree with everything that everybody said, but women in music who have power have control over their image. If you look at artists like Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter or Rihanna, it is very possible and realistic that a woman with power over her image may also choose to present herself in a sexualised way. That is on her terms, and it does not have to necessarily be a negative thing. It is important for women to be able to embody their sexuality.
Charisse made a very good point about how influential the music industry is. Speaking for myself, I have taken positive influence from musicians I admire talking about those issues or presenting themselves in ways that I had not necessarily thought were available to me. There is a lot of positive influence to be had here as well. We should not necessarily consider a sexualised image to be bad as long as the person portraying it has control over it as opposed to it being handed down to them by a record label, or management or so on.
There was also one really good example recently worth quoting which is related to all this. Mabel, the 28-year-old British pop star who has had five top 10 UK singles, recently talked about the lack of autonomy that she has had. She is a young mixed race woman, Neneh Cherry’s daughter. She said, “Particularly as a young woman, it’s so easy to get moulded into something which is usually based on what another female pop act has done. Like, this person’s done this so this is what you should do.” She said, “The reason why I’ve been making music that a lot of people say has been heard before is because I’ve got 5 million different people’s opinions getting in the way constantly. How am I meant to be making something groundbreaking, different and authentic when there’s so many cooks in the kitchen?” That is exactly what Charisse was saying about authenticity and people who have something to offer who are not necessarily being allowed to work in the conditions that would let them offer it.
Q21 Rosie Duffield: This one is directly to Celeste. What are the everyday ways in which women working in the industry experience prejudice? That might be a really hard one to answer.
Celeste Waite: It is quite a hard question to answer. In my head, I still had some stuff swirling around based on the last point and it might end up feeding into this. I suppose there is a reality within the framework which is that music is something for the soul and from the soul. It is something that has been made into a huge global business and has been industrialised, if you like, over a 100-year period. There are some systemic behaviours and traits that started in the time when women’s position in society was different from what it is now. Some parts of it—some tropes, if you like—have been passed down, and that is a little of what remains. Then there are obviously the more harmful and abusive behaviours, which we always know are categorically wrong.
The kinds of prejudices that you can face on a daily basis within the music industry are people second-guessing your ideas, people realising that you have said the same thing five times over five or six different meetings, experiencing a lot of comparison to other female artists when perhaps there is no real reason for comparison based on your expression, or style of music, or style of writing. The comparison is made purely on a visual basis. For myself, I will quite often hear comparison with other biracial female artists around my age. That encourages a culture of women not really speaking to women within the music industry, which is such a shame. We need to be able to feel that we can speak to one another so that we can also act in protecting one another.
If I was going to say one thing today, it is that that is something I would like to change in order to take control of ourselves and break down the barriers that are set in a competitive environment. We are all competitive. I am very competitive in my career, but I do not seek to compete with specific other individual women. If anything, I want to uplift them, but I always feel like there is a barrier that gives you a feeling that somebody harbours a negative feeling or thought towards you, and you have never even spoken to them in your life or even met in person. That is definitely coming from somewhere that is not just down to men alone. It is a culture within the industry that I am sure male artists experience too. Of course, as we know, the majority of people working within our industry are men. They hold a vital responsibility and a weight in making changes and being a part of the success of women within this industry and women feeling understood and heard.
Q22 Rosie Duffield: I was totally engrossed in that. This is for Dr Beaumont but anyone who wants to can contribute: to what extent do you think that misogyny in music can be reduced by having more women, including women of colour, in senior leadership roles?
Dr Beaumont: It can be tackled, absolutely. The organisation I work for, Black Lives in Music, has 110 organisational partners, and the ones that have women at the helm are the ones that do the deep-rooted work. They are the ones that are diversifying the make-up of the organisations, taking EDI seriously, and creating pathways for people to come through, particularly women. They took this inquiry very seriously and, where they could, they implemented the recommendations independently. UK music data says that women at senior management level in the music industry are actually nearly 50:50. They are at 48.3%. I will let you think about what that means and what you may have seen in the past.
You mentioned black women. Unfortunately, that cannot be said of black women at all. There are very few senior leaders. There are some, I know them, and they are great. They are watching me now. If they are, sorry. They are amazing and they do great work. But in terms of black women receiving misogyny, it would help if we had more black women at senior management level. Black women are the most disadvantaged in the music industry. They get paid the least: they are paid 52% less than white men, 17% less than black men, and 25% less than white women. They experience racism at a rate of 89%. We have spoken about bullying and harassment. Our data says that, unfortunately, 41% of black women working in the music industry have seen their mental health decline. It is really hard.
Black women are also the first to lose their jobs, if you let me just ride this home. I will not say the date, but early last year, in a 36-hour period my phone rang, or I had messages sent from black women who are directors across the music industry. They all lost their jobs. They were the first to go when it was time for the industries to do cuts, both here and in America. They are the least valued in the music industry. Where I see change with regard to women in leadership roles, I am seeing them build up the pipeline. I am seeing them really build women up and really take EDI seriously. I do not see the same thing with black women.
UK Music has a 10-point plan which helps diversify the music industry. The majority of the music industry is signed up to it. At Black Lives in Music, we have an application called Equitrack which empowers organisations to combat discrimination and safeguard all people with all protective characteristics in the music industry. But I want to land this one home. I said that the industry is at 50%. I have had women who are at senior management level approach me and say, “I’m being sexually abused.” They are at senior management level. I want to say that just because they are at a high level, it does not mean that they are exempt. They still need protections. That is where CIISA can come in.
Q23 Chair: In terms of them being at the same level, are they still being paid less?
Dr Beaumont: Regarding senior management level, I do not know how much the gender pay gap is; I do not have that information on me. For black people, I could tell you as the information is readily available from amazing organisations such as PRS for Music, which has a woman at the helm and publishes the ethnicity pay gap reports. The Ivors Academy also does so, as does Sony. May I add that although not all the industry does some large corporations in the industry publish their pay gap report? I do not have that information at hand though.
Q24 Alex Brewer: Lucy, I am going to ask you first, and just for the record declare that we are distantly related. Could you tell me how well supported women are in the industry around maternity and returning to work after having a child?
Lucy Cox: Yes. I have a six-month-old baby, so I have a few things to say about this. I mentioned earlier on that in the very first audition I did, I was told that I would need to wait for somebody to become pregnant or die in order to start getting any work as a classical singer. I had a recent conversation with somebody who provides lots of my work who was telling me what a shame he thought it was that women did not stay in the industry if they took a gap of a year or two to have children, and he advised me to take on as much as I could.
Obviously, all these things lead to you feeling that you have ended your job by having a child. For lots of women that actually is the case, for lots of different reasons. With singing in particular—this goes for lots of instrumentalists as well—you are using your body and lots of the parts of your body that change when you are pregnant and have had a baby are very important in doing a good job. Having ample recovery time is really important for your job and for your long-term health. There is a cognitive dissonance there because you also need to get back to work as soon as possible in order not to fall off these people’s lists. In order to be seen, you also want to recover as quickly as possible.
The maternity allowance for self-employed people is inadequate, especially given the cost of living crisis; there was no way that I could have survived on that. I ended up working until I was about 37 weeks pregnant, that was my last big solo concert, and then I went back to work when she was eight weeks old. That was my decision. I could have juggled things around a bit, but not everybody has that choice. Apart from anything else, I was very lucky that my injuries after birth were not so extreme that I was not able to do it. You are constantly trying to balance this new responsibility of having a baby with needing to earn and not wanting to give up on the career that we are all doing because we love.
Dr Beaumont: Everything that she said correlates with the data that is out there. Nine out of 10 classical music musicians are turning down work because of parent and carer responsibilities, self-employed mothers and female carers in classical music experience an £8,000 pay penalty, only 4% of people working in classical music referenced a supportive employer, and 40% of parents working in classical music are thinking about leaving their careers. This is from the Bittersweet Symphony report from parents and carers in performing arts who do this work, particularly in classical music, urging the Government and industry to provide care for classical musicians and improve their working conditions. I just wanted to put some stats out there because that is exactly the experience that others are feeling.
Q25 Alex Brewer: I just want to follow up quickly on the language around, “Someone has to be pregnant or die,” and the finality of that. How much did that comparison with the end of a career weigh on you in terms of causing you to feel pressured in coming back to those early concerts soon after your baby was born?
Lucy Cox: You can see that it stayed with me because it was a long time ago that that person said it to me. They are still somebody I work for, and they might be clever enough not to say those things now, but I am sure that they still hold those views. Yes, it has a huge impact. There are a lot of things that are not spoken about in relation to hormones and periods and how that can affect your singing and your ability to perform on other instruments. Menopause is not really spoken about, and that can affect the voice. This probably also relates to an ageism conversation. I have had reports from women who have contacted me to say they have been told they will not be auditioned because the male person that they are asking to be heard by will not hear women over 40.
Our bodies are different from men’s bodies as far as hormones go, and there is a vulnerability there. If we take a sick day, we miss a gig, do not get paid, somebody else comes along and does that work and quite often will take over from us entirely. There is no incentive for the people who are employing us to be sympathetic or to book us again. What happens is that women end up coming back to work far too soon after having children. They end up pushing through horrible period pains or feeling ill because they are going through the menopause, or for any other sorts of reasons, even other illnesses, and there is no recourse for them.
Q26 Alex Brewer: This question is for everyone, and whoever would like to can go first. This might be a really long list. What steps could be taken to improve support for mothers in the music sector? Obviously, the classical sector from your experience, Lucy, but the other sectors as well.
Lucy Cox: I mentioned maternity allowance not providing enough money to cover most people’s basic living costs now. In my case, if my husband had been able to claim more paternity leave, we would have been in a much better position because then we would have had a second income stream that was more guaranteed. I know that employers are supposed to provide a room for women to breastfeed or express milk and provide a fridge. I have been on tour since having the baby, and it has not been possible or perhaps not prioritised, but it has not been the case in almost any of the work that I have done since having the baby that I have been able to have private space. I have also had to throw away lots of milk, which is not as it should be.
Dr Beaumont: It is tricky in classical music. Larger organisations such as PRS for Music, again, and Sony have schemes for working mothers. I would not say it is an improvement, but some organisations are taking initiative about making changes.
Celeste Waite: I have something to say on this, but obviously you have the experience of being a recent mother. I am 30, so at a point in life where you begin to think about whether that is something you want to do. From my perspective, what happens within our industry is you work and work and work to meet the highest level of your expectation or ambition for where you want your career to reach, and there is no measure of time in writing saying how long that will take. In a way, it is up to you to decide how much you want to keep pursuing and pursuing to reach what you feel you deserve.
I was lucky enough recently to have a conversation with my managers, and it is important to mention that I have a male manager and two female managers working on my team. We spoke about whether that is something I want to do, even if it is in five or ten years from now if it is possible. We spoke about setting things up in a way that I am able to do that. Not everybody has the support in their surroundings to have those conversations and to plan financially towards that goal. As an independent artist, or as a signed artist to a major label or an independent label, it is really your responsibility to earn your own money and perhaps put aside a fund for yourself to be able to take that time off.
Some people are working towards an annual salary within what they do, but that perhaps can only be achieved if they perform at festivals every summer, or they release an album every year. If you do not necessarily earn enough to give yourself that security for the duration of the time you would like to take off, you will not have any financial security. The question bears a certain weight when you are asking yourself whether that is something you want to create an opportunity for within your life.
Obviously, there are other factors that come into play for that to be possible, but also not necessarily. I know lots of women who are in a position where they can afford to take certain routes which do not require them to meet somebody and be impregnated by somebody they are in a relationship with. That is definitely something that I think about as a businesswoman, if you like. You have to come to terms with the fact that that might have to be a route you take, and it might be the decision that you make for yourself later on, and then you factor in what support you can create around yourself to be able to do that.
If you have not been in a fortunate enough position to raise the money yourself and earn the money yourself and then save it, it does not necessarily allow you the freedom to do that without it posing the question of whether you are walking away from your career. Like you mentioned, that is a huge fear. The fear within my area comes from the fact that the music industry is so fast-paced, and there are a select few people—I have been lucky enough to be one of them—who get that support from the machine, if you like, from this industrialised mechanical operation that I mentioned earlier. Things are budgeted annually. There is only a certain amount of budget assigned to a certain number of people every year. If you are seen to not be able to promote your album over a two-year period, then there is a chance—I am not 100% sure—that budget might get assigned to somebody else. They have to prioritise who certain budgets go to. There are different reasons why you might get budgeting over others.
Laura Snapes: Coming back to how we were talking about image and sexualisation earlier, very often after a female musician—particularly a pop star—has a baby, suddenly they will be seen as DOA. Nobody could possibly be interested anymore because a woman who has a baby is deeply undesirable, as it were. It is perceived that being a pop star is all about the appearance of being available and desirable to other people. I forget the exact title of it, but Paloma Faith made a very persuasive documentary about this happening to her a few years ago, which I would really recommend anybody watching.
Again, it comes down to how much power you have. Beyoncé has a number of children. She can present that as part of her overall artistic package, and nobody is taking that away from her. The lower you go down the power scale within the industry, the more women would find—particularly in the pop area—that they are cast aside when they go through that process.
Q27 Chair: I just wanted to ask a quick question before we come to Christine’s section of questions. There are a lot of logistics after having a child, and in industries such as the music industry where you do not have normal working hours between 9 am and 5 pm and you work Saturdays and Sundays, what about childcare? How is this managed? Is it talked about? Is any part of the industry being supportive of that at all, Charisse?
Dr Beaumont: I will be honest, I am hoping maybe the next panel can answer that, but I have not heard of anything positive about childcare. Obviously, we have Pregnant Then Screwed. It worked alongside certain organisations within the music industry to lobby the Government for childcare. That is about as far as I have heard about the music industry being involved in that.
Lucy Cox: Yes, it is a real worry. A lot of my life before having a baby was going on longer tours. It is not financially viable to take her because it involves taking another caring adult. That means my husband cannot work and we are looking at paying for flights and accommodation for him as well, let alone the practicalities of it, which is a whole load of work that then becomes unavailable to me. But as I mentioned, there is also enormous pressure to keep on trying to make these tours work. I am thinking in the future of carting the baby off to Europe on various different occasions and making a loss. It is something that I feel I have to do in order to maintain my foothold because, as we have said, if you do not do the work then somebody else might well do it, and then you might not get invited back.
It is a huge challenge. In terms of concerts in the UK or concerts that are closer to home, at the moment only one of us can work at a time. My husband is also a singer, so we have to make a choice about who is going to take each job as it comes. I am not getting the same invitations to do big tours as I had before I got pregnant. I had a little look at my tax return for 2023-24 just before this session, and an employer that gave me 30% of my income last year has not invited me to take part in a concert since I was pregnant. It is allowed; there is nothing to stop that from happening. The employer would say it is a coincidence. By the way, only 4% of my work was booked by women, so I wonder if the classical music industry is behind the rest of the industry in terms of equality in positions of power. Yes, it is a challenge working out how to readjust my career in a way that fits with looking after her.
Q28 Christine Jardine: First, thank you to all four of you for coming and speaking to us today and being so open about the challenges that you face. Lucy, the Musicians’ Union and others have described a lack of facilities and structural support for women working and performing at live music events. Is that something you recognise? If so, is the situation improving in any way?
Lucy Cox: It is a real challenge in classical music because a lot of the venues we perform in are very old, so we find ourselves in lots of churches and cathedrals. On a recent tour that I did just before Christmas, we were working in venues where there were renovations happening so the usual facilities were not available. Even when they are, we are often thrown into dressing rooms that are very cramped. Sometimes, there is no separate dressing room for the women, and you are just getting changed in a church vestry. It is not glamorous, and often you have to leave the building to use loos when you are working in churches, so that is a real challenge. Not just in the music industry but over the whole country, I have struggled with changing facilities and having to change the baby on the floor of public loos and things like this. That is a real problem when you are out working, you have dragged her along with you and you are not at home. From the perspective of having a child with you, there is a lot that could be improved.
Q29 Christine Jardine: As a journalist, I remember interviewing a very well-known popular music artist in a theatre and being absolutely astonished at the lack of facilities and how bad the facilities were there. Is this lack of facilities and structural support for women something you have all experienced in your careers?
Celeste Waite: It is definitely not as glamorous as people think it is. It varies across all the different venues, and when you are touring you definitely see all kinds of different rooms. Because I am a single woman and I tour with my band, I am quite open with them. For me personally it is not distressing, and I just take it as it comes. Sometimes I have really nice places and sometimes not so nice places.
This sounds as though it is in relation to the conversation around asking music venues and certain spaces that host activities related to a career in music to improve their facilities or staff when it comes to sexual assault or the safety of women. If a law is passed in which venues that are expected to improve do not receive funding until they make those improvements, it is really important that smaller more grassroots venues are protected within this decision because there are some venues that have charm.
It is also really important that we keep venues for 100, 200 or 300 people because people progressing in their career need to be able to have that first gig where they play to even fewer than 100 people to get to the gig where they can play in front of 10,000 people. If this piece of legislation would affect those venues, it is really important that they have some financial support. Otherwise, you might see that some venues in central London may be able to survive because they have a regular clientele, but then smaller venues around regional towns and things may not survive. We like playing those shows, and it gives us a chance to offer something to people that is a memorable and intimate experience when it comes to the live performance.
When it comes to protecting women against any form of physical violence within these spaces, we need to have more personnel there who are educated in how to spot these sorts of behaviours. Women need to feel safe in being able to share their experiences. I experienced something completely separate from and outside the music industry. I wanted to report something so that it did not happen to other women, but I was really afraid to report it in case it was not dealt with at the level of severity that was due and I might then experience some behaviours from this person whom I had already deemed to be a danger to my life, and they could come after me.
A lot of women within the music industry who experience these kinds of things are very afraid. They are not necessarily protected. Once they bring something to people’s awareness, they do not have the trust that it will be dealt with appropriately. Some people have experienced reporting something, and then the perpetrator of the act is called, and their name is immediately mentioned. Where does that really leave you? I can understand what it is like to be in that position from something I have experienced outside the music industry, and I know that it is something that women within our industry face and experience when they are met with certain forms of abuse.
Q30 Christine Jardine: I wonder if I could also ask Laura first. To what extent do you think the working conditions that we have been talking about for female artists are a factor in their lower representation in live music event lineups?
Laura Snapes: I do not know that I would necessarily make that correlation. One thing that is important to highlight here when it comes to the infrastructure of music venues—not just talking about the buildings themselves—is the different roles that exist in those places. You would struggle to find a female musician who has not been talked down to and patronised by a male sound engineer because they either assume she does not know what she is talking about, or they do not like taking instructions from a woman. Again, to come back to that point about education and young men, women are vastly underrepresented in sound technology and live music production, and more needs to be done to make those careers seem both available and enjoyable to them.
I am not sure if every venue and pub has to do this—it certainly seems very widespread now—but across the country you will see the Ask for Angela thing. It seems as though many staff in places are trained in looking out for the wellbeing of the clientele who are at the venues. Venues, bars, and anywhere that is putting on live music, also need to have a similar code of conduct for anybody to report wrongdoing among any of the personnel putting on the gig, whether it is the sound person or a security person, because that is where a lot of discouragement happens. I am not saying that necessarily leads to lower representation on bills, but it would definitely put some people off doing it again.
I also wanted to talk about one really positive example because there is the possibility for artists to make change on their own terms and for that to have a top-down impact. In 2018, I did a feature on the musician Fever Ray, who is a Swedish non-binary performer. Their real name is Karin Dreijer-Andersson, and they used to be in the band The Knife. I was asked to write a piece about the radical culture on their tour, which employed nine women or non-binary people and four men; even the truck driver was a woman. The performers and the technical staff I spoke to talked about how comfortable and free they felt, how much kindness and confidence there was on tour, how they felt they could take up more space in the room. They held discussion sessions every day for anybody to air issues or any discomfort, and they prioritised care and wellbeing for everybody on the tour. The effect was revelatory, and it did not really seem as though it had taken all that much to create an environment where everybody felt safe and liberated to do their best work and express themselves without restriction. That is a model that a lot of people could adopt quite easily.
Christine Jardine: That is very interesting.
Dr Beaumont: There is so much in this. I can give 1 million examples that are just coming into my head. I agree, Laura, it is good if you can do things on your own terms. We have had artists call Black Lives in Music and say, “You know what? I just need to revamp my entire team. I just want women, and if they can be black, that’s great,” because of the way they were treated by their current team, their roadies. This is the main artist. These are artists of renown, by the way. If I was to say who it was you would be mind-blown.
On representation and why a lot of women feel unsafe in the live music industry, the music industry is made up of 72% freelancers. Of those freelancers, 13.6% are women, just 13%. The gender imbalance can create an environment where we are seeing women workers inappropriately touched, propositioned on a regular basis, and sexually assaulted. Unfortunately, freelancers do not receive the same education about bullying and harassment as employees. They are not subject to the same employment laws, and it is very hard to tackle abuse as a freelancer, especially if the perpetrators are also freelancers. I am sure the MU will speak about it, but 40% of women under 40 have been sexually harassed at a live music event, and 95% of incidents go unreported.
Like Laura, I also want to speak about some positives that are happening in the live music industry. Again, we work with 110 partners. We work with loads of festivals, but one of the festivals we work with is working intentionally to ensure that there are more women represented behind the stage, in production, in the technical aspect of creating a festival.
We have LIVE, which is the umbrella body for the live music industry, and as I said earlier on, it has taken the recommendations from the WEC report and implemented them within its organisations. It is committed to eradicating misogyny in the live music industry; it has the sub-committee; it is committed to collectively benchmarking female representatives at CEO and chair level across the entire live music industry. It has educational awareness training and gender equality and sexual harassment training, then you have the Royal Albert Hall, where you are talking about representation on the stage. It is the first music industry organisation to pay into CIISA, it has EDI champions across the entire workforce and is working in a positive direction on policies. We work very closely with it.
What we need is a cultural change in the music industry. I wish I had had that question about MeToo. That was a movement; a movement moves, it goes. We need cultural change. The only way that can happen is if people are educated and if, like Lucy said, there are consequences to their actions. The only recommendation I see that brings true consequences to the actions of bullying and harassment is CIISA being sustained and invested into.
There is loads of stuff I wanted to say and I did not get to say. I am going to end here. I have heard from the top—I am talking the top, I can mention names—of the music industry, and they have told me categorically the only thing that they are afraid of is the Government. The only thing that will move them to change is the Government. All the work that we are doing at Black Lives in Music is nice; they will work with us, they may even fund us, but the only thing that is going to make them change is if it comes from the Government. We need the Government to get involved. I said it earlier on, there are thousands and thousands of voices. We do not need any more reports. We need the report to be actioned and enacted, and then we need the Government to help us set up a third-party organisation to make change in the music industry, and CIISA is that.
Chair: I just want to say thank you very much to all our panellists today. That has been really enlightening but also really humbling in the personal experiences shared. Thank you very much, and I am going to bring on the next panel now. Thank you.
Witnesses: Deborah Annetts, Jen Smith and Naomi Pohl.
Chair: We are going to resume with the second panel of our misogyny in music session. We have Deborah Annetts, chief executive officer of the Independent Society of Musicians; Jen Smith, chief executive officer of the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority, and Naomi Pohl, general secretary of Musicians’ Union. Welcome, and I imagine that you will have been able to reflect on and probably re-hear some of the things that you already know from the first panel. We went into some great depth there, and I am really hoping that we will be able to do so in the next session as well. I am going to hand over to Kirith first. Thank you.
Q31 Kirith Entwistle: Thank you, Chair. Jen, my first question is for you. Could you briefly update the Committee on where CIISA is in terms of its development and launch?
Jen Smith: Yes, of course. Before I do so, I would just like to thank the previous witnesses for their powerful testimony, which, of course, emphasised the urgent need for an independent body that can provide a safe space to give impartial confidential advice to the many harms that are current and occurring in the music sector. I am delighted to be back to update the Committee. I cannot underestimate the significance of revisiting this landmark report, which continues to play an important role in our ongoing conversations with the sector. I am pleased to report that, as you will have heard from Dr Charisse Beaumont, in the main, there is significant support for CIISA within the music sector. However, that goodwill must be translated into sustainable financial commitment. The need for CIISA is evident. This is demonstrated not just in individuals who are coming to us desperately in need of help and support but also from smaller employers who are challenged as they grapple with these difficult issues and are looking for independent impartial support and guidance. We have now reached this tipping point where there is irreversible insight that, despite all best efforts, there is a persistent problem with behaviours in the music industry and CIISA has a significant role to play in addressing that.
Specifically, since we last met, we have laid very strong foundations of governance for the organisation. We have recruited a wise and engaged board, and we are ably chaired by Baroness Helena Kennedy. We have expanded the team with relevant expertise. In response to recommendation 129, we have established a cross-industry roundtable on progressing licensing, accreditation, and training for key roles with safeguarding responsibilities. Crucially, we have applied to the Department for Business and Trade to become a prescribed person. What this means is that, when CIISA is operational, we will be able to advise and support people who have signed a non-disclosure agreement without them fearing repercussions. In the coming weeks, we will publish further details on our operational blueprint. We are formally engaging with those who we anticipate coming to CIISA in the final stages of design of our processes, putting it at the heart of how they will be served and how they can ensure that we are a safe confidential place to hear their concerns. We are at the beginning stages of designing our reporting system. That said, the fundamental problem of sustainable funding remains. CIISA will not be built on warm wishes and one-year commitments. Even where we are now, we remain six, most likely nine months away from being operational with a small advice team, and that is contingent on funded commitments being immediately met and honoured. So, that is the challenge we face where we require your assistance.
Certainly, I can update you on standards. Yesterday we closed our consultation on CIISA standards. We had over 700 people engage with that consultation with a significant proportion from the music sector. It presents a significant milestone for the creative industries as a whole, a unifying set of standards which we will socialise and embed widely so there is no excuse to say that you did not know that was not appropriate behaviour. In tandem, we have done some international work with global industry. We have spoken to 20 territories about the potential for an international standards framework, and we will publish that research in due course. We continue to liaise closely with the DCMS because we know we have a role to play in the industrial strategy. You cannot grow the creative industries effectively without protecting the workforce, and we have a fundamental role in the prevention of violence against women and girls. This has been a constant theme when CIISA has spoken to colleagues across England, and in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland too. That represents the majority of our progress, so we have not stood still. That said, sustainable funding and a protected funding mechanism for CIISA is crucial.
Q32 Kirith Entwistle: Thank you so much for making that very clear; that is really useful and really important. Has anyone already been in touch with you wanting to make use of CIISA’s upcoming services?
Jen Smith: Yes. People are desperate. There is an urgent and fundamental gap in provision. Yes, there are lots of places you can go, but there is no front-door service that joins the dots. People fall through those gaps. As you heard in previous testimony, they are also concerned about repercussions and the genuine safety and confidentiality of what they will bring to us. So, yes, we are giving limited advice. I can reassure the Committee that we have professional expertise in the team to do that to a high standard but, again, it is not just individuals coming to us, it is SMEs saying, “We do not know what to do. We have a code of conduct; we have no investigations procedure. What are the steps that we should take as a responsible employer?” So, the gap is evident, the need is evident, the urgency is evident, but we need your help to ensure that CIISA can be operational as quickly as possible.
[Christine Jardine took the Chair]
Chair: Please, carry on.
Q33 Kirith Entwistle: You touched on it there, but are you able to give a sense of what your initial workload might look like given that CIISA is already committed to helping people with historical cases?
Jen Smith: This comes down to the sequencing and pacing of CIISA, which we will put in the public domain in the coming weeks. In the first instance, setting standards is absolutely right, to socialise those, to enable the industry to become cognisant of what they are, and embedding those. We will be launching those next month, again, with a real appetite and a good response to get behind those standards as a consistent barometer for behaviours. However, in terms of analysing volumes, it is a challenge for us because there is so much fear. While people have come forward, we just do not know the scale of what might come out, which is why secure, stable and sustainable funding is absolutely key, and we need to ensure that we report first. We will bring in a small advice team and a reporting portal so we can do some analysis of what the future three to five-year growth of CIISA will be.
Q34 Kirith Entwistle: How willing has the industry been to commit funding to CIISA?
Jen Smith: There is a coalition of the willing. You heard some of them: for example, the trade body LIVE, the Royal Albert Hall, English National Opera, Black Lives in Music, and many more, so many good, responsible leaders that want to see this done, that recognise instinctively that it is an inevitable reality that this needs to happen; it is just a question of how long it takes. However, there are others, particularly alarmingly in the live sector, that have not committed funding and I will write to the Committee in full when our funding round is concluded. You might also like to see the wider context of screen and theatre as well. One of the challenges we have on funding is that people are trying to set conditions on our operational scope. For example, “We will fund you, but only if you only do training,” Obviously, as an independent body, we cannot accept conditions on our funding. It is a new relationship that we are building with industry to understand that an independent body is different. In terms of scoping CIISA in the first instance, this was an agreed principle. We all sat down and agreed with representatives from the BPI and others that the agreed tariff model would be 0.1%, and that would be a two-year tie-in commitment. So, this was agreed with the sector and yet it is taking longer than we thought for people to commit to it, hence we are exploring alternative models.
Q35 Kirith Entwistle: Are there any major organisations that have not provided the level of funding commitment that you have sought?
Jen Smith: I will write to you in full.
Q36 Kirith Entwistle: Thank you very much. Are there any legislative impediments to CIISA’s work around, for example, data protection?
Jen Smith: I spoke to this in my previous evidence. We have identified mitigations to potential legal issues. As we have said, we have made progress in terms of supporting those people who have signed NDAs, and by applying to be a prescribed person in relation to section 43F of the Employment Rights Act 1996, so that is in train. We have also raised some issues with the DCMS about GDPR. As we are building CIISA very responsibly, very meticulously, very diligently, one of the first things that I did was to register us with the ICO and to make it known that we are dealing with data with the legitimate aim to prevent harm. We have raised what we consider could be legal challenges for CIISA with the DCMS and those conversations are ongoing, but we are aware of potential mitigations that would help us to act independently with the full scope of operational ability that we require to do this work to the right standard.
Q37 Kirith Entwistle: What commitments have the Government made to address some of those legal impediments?
Jen Smith: We are in conversation about that; it is a very live dialogue at the moment. We have very recently spoken to the DCMS. Obviously, since I updated this Committee there has been a change of Government, but I have met with the Secretary of State twice on these matters. It is evident to me how seriously she takes the care of the workforce and the creative industries; therefore, those conversations are ongoing.
Q38 Kirith Entwistle: You have already alluded to this, but is a statutory funding model required if CIISA is to be sustainable?
Jen Smith: We are looking at a range of alternative models. It would be a great shame in the face of undeniable evidence of need and undeniable evidence of harms if, collectively, voluntarily, the industry cannot show leadership on this agenda to keep the workforce safe. We are only asking for 0.1% of UK turnover. However, we watch with interest what has recently been addressed in the gambling sector where there is a mandated levy, albeit in pursuit of the prevention of harm to consumers. That said, the principle is the same; there is a mandated levy in order to prevent harm. But, in addressing this point with the Committee, and writing to you in terms of looking at where we get to with funding, we certainly would visit all options because this is absolutely essential.
Kirith Entwistle: Thank you so much.
[Sarah Owen resumed the Chair]
Chair: Thank you, Kirith. And thank you, Christine, for sitting in as Chair.
Q39 Christine Jardine: Not at all. Deborah, what does the latest key data on the prevalence of discrimination and sexual harassment in the music sector tell you, and are there any signs of the situation improving?
Deborah Annetts: Thank you very much for the invitation to talk to you this afternoon; I really appreciate the opportunity. Just before I start, I am actually an employment solicitor and my specialism is discrimination law, so I come at this very much in the context of statute and what needs to happen in terms of legislative changes. Although there has been some indication from this new Government of change in a variety of areas, they still need to go further because, at the moment, the freelancers are very much outside the scope of the equalities legislation and the Employment Rights Bill. When you look at the language of the legislation which is being proposed, it is all about an employment model. Within my own membership of 11,000 musicians, 90% of them are self-employed. That just demonstrates that the legislation that is being proposed is going to fall short of tackling the issues that we have on a statutory basis. Although I absolutely welcome the efforts of CIISA to promote better standards within the sector, we also need to have a better statutory framework, otherwise, I do not feel we are going to see justice for the protected characteristics, chiefly women.
In terms of data, I do not think the situation is getting any better. You have Dignity at work 2 in front of you. That was published in 2022 and was a follow-up to Dignity at work 1 in 2018. The 2022 report found that the situation was getting worse, and that discrimination was increasing. When we asked our researchers what they thought was going on they—as Dr Beaumont spoke about—thought it was the impact of social media. We also have to understand that in a freelance community we do not have normal workplaces; we have informal settings. Very often there is no HR function whatsoever. I always give the example of a wedding band where you have four people in a band touring the country; there is no HR function; they are probably friends. Something inappropriate may happen. From Dignity at work 1, one of the comments was, “I always travel with a sleeping bag to stop sexual assault.” That is just the nature of the culture. The second report generated about 660 responses and what was so frightening was how quickly they came in: really, really fast. We did not have to go out and encourage people to respond. It was largely women responding, and they wanted to share with us what had happened in their careers. Most of them were freelance. The discrimination and sexual harassment had happened everywhere: in sessions, in churches, in schools, on stage, you name it, they had been sexually harassed in every single location.
In terms of the prevalence of freelance versus employed, it was more weighted towards freelancers and that, of course, is because they do not have the rights that employed workers do. They are not protected under the legislation, the Equality Act, which is something we have been calling for for some time and, in particular, section 83(2)(b), which leaves depping musicians out in the cold. Of those who reported sexual harassment, 88% of them were self-employed, which shows the problem in terms of the freelance model while 69% did not report because of fear of victimisation. That, again, just shows the problem; you will not report if you think you are not going to get another gig. We have had women coming to our legal team; we have six lawyers working for us. I myself, as I said, am an employment solicitor. What we see is that when we take a sex discrimination case and, theoretically, women are protected in relation to victimisation under the equalities legislation, they still end up not getting more work because they have reported. That is the problem, and it is one of my concerns around CIISA. I absolutely welcome the idea of people being able to go there, but there is still the risk that if people come forward, it could be at detriment to their own careers, and that is why we need a rigorous statutory framework to work within.
I just want to mention one other thing which I found deeply troubling. We worked with the Equality and Human Rights Commission following Dignity at work 2. They were very concerned about the state of the music sector, and we discussed whether the Commission should come in and do an investigation into the music sector because it is so bad. It does not have the resources to do that, but I would welcome the Commission coming into the sector and making some really strong recommendations. Instead, it said that it could work with us on an orchestra toolkit. It was basically going to use the expertise that it had developed with the hospitality sector and felt that this might have some kind of impact in relation to culture, and we certainly have a problem with culture. It is not just men harassing downwards, it is colleagues harassing across. That is a very important thing to understand in relation to the nature of sexual harassment within our sector. Anyway, we worked on an orchestral toolkit. We asked the Association of British Orchestras whether it would work with us, and it said yes. The Musicians’ Union, Black Lives in Music, and various other organisations also said yes, so we felt that we had really good feedback in relation to the toolkit. We then put it out to orchestras free of charge, “This will help you with the modelling of better behaviours within your orchestras.” We sent it to about 16 orchestras. We got their feedback, and we did more work on the toolkit. We then went out again and asked 14 orchestras if they would trial it, again, totally free. Five said that they could not and gave various excuses; nine did not come back to us at all. Only one came back and said it would give it a go. So, this was a toolkit that had been developed by the music sector with the insights and experience of the Commission which the orchestras have not picked up. We heard back informally that it was because the attitudes in the orchestras were so entrenched that they did not want to get involved with the toolkit. Trying to unpick those attitudes was really what the whole toolkit was about.
My question is: how do you shift culture? I do not know how to tackle this, and I feel I should know because this is my field of expertise. I will go back to my experience as an employment lawyer because I worked in the tribunal for many years and sued an awful lot of organisations. I actually think you need to sue people. You need to sue companies, and you need to sue senior managers to shift culture. That sounds tremendously aggressive, but the culture of this sector is not going to shift just with CIISA. We need a better statutory framework, and then we need to have some test cases. Thank you.
Q40 Christine Jardine: Thank you. Naomi, is there anything you want to add to that?
Naomi Pohl: Thank you, yes. Dr Beaumont referenced a musician census that we ran along with Help Musicians. We had 6,000 responses to that, which was fantastic because we had been looking for a dataset so that we could really understand the careers of musicians today. We actually ran a smaller version of that survey in 2013, and it showed the average earnings then for musicians were £20,000 and, on average, they are still earning just £20,000 with women musicians earning less than male musicians. To me, the most shocking stat was of the musicians earning over £70,000 a year, only 19% of those were women. It shows that women are facing many barriers to having successful careers in music and they are facing discrimination. More women face age discrimination: 30% of women reported that, whereas only 21% of men did. Of the women who responded, 87% had experienced or witnessed discrimination as opposed to 65% of men. As you would expect, childcare falls much more heavily on women, even though a lot of men in music, because of the working hours, might look after their children during the day or pick them up from school. It does not present a career barrier to men in the same way that it does to women. So, 29% said that family commitments were a barrier, whereas only 18% of men said that. Obviously, childcare is costly, and it was referenced in the previous panel that there just is not the support there.
If I could give an example of an orchestral musician who is a freelancer: I was talking to a woman last week who said that she was doing a gig. It was £100 for the concert, two hours for her to travel there by car and two hours to travel home. She could not stay overnight because she could not afford the accommodation. If I could put another piece of the jigsaw puzzle forward, it is that there are a lot of financial problems in the music industry. Obviously, women and men working in music can be quite low earning and that means that there is quite a power imbalance in the working relationships. As we have heard, freelancers are desperate to maintain their careers and to earn and they do not always have a choice to step away from a gig even if there is a perpetrator in that environment. They are in a position where they cannot pay their mortgage or their bills but they still have to go and do the gig regardless. Safety concerns then take a back seat because you are not given sufficient expenses to go and do the gig in order to book the accommodation or to get home safely or to use a taxi instead of walking home, for example. There are many problems, and the imbalance of power is a big one.
We have also heard about informal working environments. Bad contracts are a problem as well. We have heard about NDAs, but also people are often trapped into really unpleasant deals that go on for very long periods of time. They find it very hard to extricate themselves from those deals even if something’s gone wrong in a working relationship or if they have been a survivor of abuse. We have heard about the prevalence of alcohol and drugs in environments, and issues around touring as well. If you are on a tour bus or if you are in a hotel room after a gig, there are a lot of environments where it is unpoliced and, if there is an issue that is reported, sometimes the employer or engager will not take responsibility because it happened out of hours. We had one case where there was an incident of abuse on tour and the woman who had experienced the abuse was told that she had to go and report it to the police in that local territory. The employer did not take any responsibility for it because it happened in a hotel room after a concert; it did not actually happen on their watch, if you like. These are the kinds of problems that we are facing. Since 2019, we have been running a Safe Space service for musicians and anyone working in music. We have had constant reports coming in. We had quite an influx at the beginning when we opened it. There were quite a lot of reports even during covid closures when I thought it might go quiet, but online abuse was still occurring. We are still seeing very frequent reports. So, this is not a problem that has gone away. We think CIISA is crucial, and we would support what Jen said. I do not think Jen should be spending her time going around to organisations trying to negotiate to get them to pay into CIISA. It needs to be mandatory. If people can opt out, they will opt out. I would also support what Deborah said about needing the legislative framework as well.
Chair: Thank you. Before you start, Christine, I just want to say that there are likely to be votes soon. When the bells go, we will suspend the session; we will vote and then come back. That means we might overrun slightly. Is everyone okay with that? Good. Thank you.
Q41 Christine Jardine: Just to follow up on that, you have previously found that 48% of those who suffered inappropriate behaviour did not report it; there was no one to report to. Are you confident that the creation of CIISA will be a game changer in that regard?
Naomi Pohl: It definitely will be. I have mentioned that we run our Safe Space service, and we have had many reports but a lot of women who report do not ever see meaningful justice. Particularly if you are a freelancer and you are making a report about another freelancer, it might be historic in nature and it is very difficult for engagers, even if they receive a report, to deal with it if it is something that happened many years ago, or if that project has closed and the two freelancers are no longer working together. In music particularly, people will go and do one gig for an engager, so there are very short-term contracts and that means that it is very difficult to find the right reporting mechanism. I have said to Jen previously that we have been running Safe Space for a long time but this is not proprietorial, this is not about who owns a certain issue. This is an issue that affects the whole of the music industry. I would be delighted if we could close Safe Space because there were no longer reports and there was no longer a need. CIISA, as an independent body, will hopefully be trusted and be able to provide that extra level of investigation and support.
Q42 Christine Jardine: Deborah, you said you thought the only answer was to sue. Does that mean that you feel there needs to be more than CIISA, or do you think CIISA can be a game changer?
Deborah Annetts: I am not sure is the honest answer and that may be just because of my background as an employment solicitor. I believe that you have to have, at the very base, rights that you can enforce. At the moment, if you are a freelancer, there is a lack of rights, which means you are excluded from the equalities legislation. There have been changes in relation to—and this gets very technical—something called discrimination questionnaires, which used to be available but were abolished by the Cameron Government. We still have not sorted out third-party harassment and, at the moment, what has been drafted within the Employment Rights Bill is predicated on an employment relationship. Within music, as you have heard, it is largely a freelance relationship so that simply will not meet the challenge. We also need to absolutely tackle NDAs, and I speak as somebody who must have done about 1,000 NDAs in my lifetime, so I hold my hands up in relation to doing NDAs, but we need to have a look at them. If they are commercial, fine. If they are related to sex discrimination and harassment or anything relating to protected characteristics then we either scrap them or we make them time-limited.
Lastly, I believe, and again this is because of my background, that we need to fund the Equality and Human Rights Commission adequately. In 2010, its budget was £53 million. It is now £17 million and those were cuts carried out by the last Government, and it makes it very difficult for it to discharge its statutory duties. My own view is that CIISA may be part of the jigsaw, but I worry about two things in relation to CIISA. One is that you make an approach and then you are victimised. How do we protect the individual? That is the first thing, because victimisation is ever so common. The second aspect in relation to CIISA is timeframes and, again, I speak as an employment solicitor. One of the most important things in employment law is getting your claim in on time. Government have now said that they are going to change the timeframe for bringing a claim from three to six months which is fantastic news but, sometimes, particularly in the field of maternity law, things can go very badly wrong for the woman and they find themselves out of time to bring a case. It is really important that CIISA is adequately signposting things like the time period for bringing a claim. At the moment, CIISA does not signpost to ACAS, which is absolutely essential because so much work is done in relation to ACAS. There are various other agencies that should be signposted which are not at the moment in relation to CIISA. I see CIISA as a work in progress rather than finally there. I am absolutely happy to put my six lawyers at the disposal of CIISA to get it into a slightly more fit for purpose situation. We do 2,000 cases a year and a third of those are in the employment space, and a lot of those relate to the nature of the workplace and something that has gone very badly wrong. So, we are very happy to work with CIISA just to absolutely tweak all the stuff to get it perfect.
Chair: Jen, just before you come in, Rachel has a supplementary question on this point.
Q43 Rachel Taylor: Thank you. Deborah, I am a lawyer myself although not an employment specialist. I just want to follow up on something that you have highlighted. You feel that for things to change, there needs to be more legal action or more people sued, but we have already touched on the fact that a lot of this space is freelancers on other freelancers.
Deborah Annetts: Exactly.
Q44 Rachel Taylor: How do you think those legal actions should take place to have effect? Obviously, private civil legal production is hugely expensive.
Deborah Annetts: No, no, no.
Chair: Can we keep answers as short as possible because we have quite a few questions to go through? Thank you, that would be good.
Deborah Annetts: That is why we are calling on the Government to act in relation to the last report from the Misogyny in Music inquiry. We need to amend the equalities legislation, so it is absolutely clear that it covers freelancers. You are absolutely right. At the moment, we do not have the tools. To my mind, this is three-pronged: we have to have the statutory framework to strengthen the legislation, which at the moment has the loophole for freelancers; it is cultural change, and you heard about the orchestras not wanting to do the toolkit; and it is CIISA. So, there are three different things here, but they all have to work together and, at the moment, unfortunately, we have not seen Government going as far as we need them to go.
Rachel Taylor: Thank you.
Q45 Christine Jardine: Naomi, what have you found to be the most effective ways of getting the industry to care about preventing and holding perpetrators of misogynistic behaviour to account?
Naomi Pohl: That is a subject that we have talked about a lot within the industry, but the meaningful change has not yet come. An example of where we have made some change in the orchestral sector is around inclusive recruitment, and the way we have done it is through meaningful partnerships. We have partnered with Black Lives in Music and the ABO and what we have done is consulted orchestras and individual musicians to try to change some very entrenched recruitment practices that have tended to mean that certain musicians are underrepresented in the workforce in orchestras. In order to see the diversity that we want to see, we have to change the recruitment practices. The way we have done that is to have a sort of pincer movement if you like: the employers working very closely with the union making sure that musicians are involved. We have rolled out a training programme that has involved the musicians as well as the employers, and we have also worked with Black Lives in Music to get it right. That has had quite a lot of positive engagement, we are beginning to see that change, and they are adopting it even though some of the recommendations were quite unpopular at first. The key thing is to collaborate and make sure that people are on board, consulted, and involved from the beginning. I referenced the financial issues that the sector faces. There are problems at the grassroots end and in orchestras where they are not funded well enough to do what they want to do and, unfortunately, initiatives around diversity and inclusion tend to drop off the agenda when organisations are in survival mode.
Chair: We are going to have to suspend the session while we vote, thank you.
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
On resuming—
Q46 Chair: We are going to resume the session while the vote takes place, and the other members will join us after they have voted. We are a quorum. Deborah, I just had a quick question about this idea of suing. As Naomi has said, there is already this massive imbalance in terms of power, but also in terms of pay. As we heard from the previous panel, the women will predominantly be lower paid, especially if they are black women, compared to their white counterparts and compared to the powerful men within the industry. How realistic do you think it is that we would ever see somebody that is, I would say, exploited by the industry actually being able to sue those who are in power and responsible for it, given the cost and the power imbalance there?
Deborah Annetts: Just going back to the ISM: we have six lawyers, and we work on a totally cost-free basis for our members. We are taking cases all the time in various different jurisdictions. We have even taken a case all the way to the Supreme Court. It does not cost our members a penny, and that is really important. It is one of the primary reasons we were set up in 1882. I am not saying that there is access to justice as much as I would like to see. What I am saying is you have to have a framework of rights in order for people to behave. That sounds really strange, but it is actually true. You have to have a framework, a statutory framework, in order to reinforce the point that there are some things that you cannot do in the workplace.
Q47 Chair: I agree with you up to a point. If we just take, for example, rape. It is illegal to rape. The prosecution rates are so low with 98% of reported rapes going completely unpunished. These laws and protections for workers are only good if they can be enforced, which is why I am asking about the reality of how these could be enforced, given the power imbalances that there are within the music industry.
Deborah Annetts: To start off with, having a framework is a deterrent. It also gives legal teams like my own something to work with when they are talking to an employer, a contractor, a record label, a promoter, or a producer, and it is really important that you have something to back up what you want to communicate. Culture is not sufficient. Trying to change culture is not sufficient; it is very difficult; and this sector has not been good at doing it. I am just going to give another example from 2023, and this is not to do with sex discrimination, it is to do with a conductor—this was in the public domain—who punched a tenor in front of everybody. Eventually, he was moved on from his orchestra, but he set up a new orchestra and then competed head-to-head with his previous employer, so there was no deterrence there in relation to the individual. I am not saying that a statutory framework would stop a conductor punching a tenor on stage, but that demonstrates some of the challenges we have with behaviour. A statutory framework, along with the work of CIISA, the work that we and the MU do, and tackling the behaviours that tend to be put in train in music colleges, which is where this culture is formulated, is a multifaceted, complex set of things that we need to address.
Chair: Thank you. I personally find it really hard to understand why it is complicated to not abuse your position of power or to punch somebody on stage. Jen, and then I will come to Naomi.
Jen Smith: For the record, may I add a few points that will be helpful for the Committee? In the first instance, it is important to reinforce that CIISA is an absolutely safe and confidential place, so any action that is taken by CIISA is driven by the user. Nobody’s identity would ever be compromised in coming to us; it is absolutely safe and confidential. In respect of time limits, we absolutely support going from three to six months in terms of employment tribunals. We have spoken extensively with ACAS, which has been incredibly helpful to us in our development and, of course, we will signpost to them and an array of other organisations once we are open for business, the point being we are not yet operational because of the funding issue that I have raised. However, in terms of being a front-door service we would help people access their rights quicker so they could get to an employment tribunal more quickly by CIISA’s presence. There are a lot of things out there, but people fall through the gaps, which is why we need to be that presence, that front door, to refer people accordingly to the most appropriate place. Thank you, Deborah, for your kind offer of employment law support, but we are taking independent employment law counsel at KC level.
Chair: Thank you. Naomi, just quickly, and then I am going to come to Kirith.
Naomi Pohl: I just wanted to say that it is a cultural issue on that particular issue of the conductor who is high profile because unfortunately the orchestral world has decided that it is okay for him to carry on working and people will still work for him internationally because of his profile. There have been a couple of articles published in the press since which made me so angry, basically saying that in order to maintain artistic excellence, it is okay to accept these levels of behaviour and we have to say, as an industry, that it is not okay. That involves everybody standing together, and CIISA’s role will be really important in the culture change piece.
Q48 Kirith Entwistle: Naomi, to what extent do you think some venues are ill-prepared to respond to sexual misconduct because of a lack of funding versus simply being apathetic?
Naomi Pohl: We talked about the Seat at the Table report, produced by Women in CTRL, which showed that there are now more women in positions on boards and at senior management level in the industry, but we probably looked more at trade bodies. I would be really interested to see a dataset looking at who actually books musicians, and who is making the choices about who gets to be on stage. If there is an apathy, then that is possibly because there is less diversity in the people making those kinds of choices. It is really important that we face up to that as an industry and try to tackle it. If we have more women booking musicians, we are going to see more women on stage. We have actually seen direct discrimination cases where people have said they do not want a female-fronted band because audiences are not interested, which is just absolutely outrageous. That is a really important element. Could you just repeat the rest of the question?
Q49 Kirith Entwistle: To what extent are some venues ill-prepared to respond to sexual misconduct because of a lack of funding versus simply being apathetic?
Jen Smith: The apathy is real, but when we talk to small organisations, they are ill-equipped, and they say that their finances are the big problem. So, if they had the money in order to put certain measures in place, then that would be an enormous help. If you look at grassroots music venues, they are closing all over the place. It is not going to be their top priority to try to fix some of these cultural problems. What they are looking at is: how do they stay open, how can they try to get as much money behind the bar as possible, how can they pay their business rates? They are in survival mode, and that is the reality of the landscape.
Q50 Chair: One of the areas that the first panel suggested as being a problem was studios being a problematic space. UK Music has set out a code of conduct called the Safer Studios initiative. Naomi or Jen, do you think that will be effective in addressing poor behaviour in these premises, or do you need to see tighter rules, regulations, and guidelines?
Naomi Pohl: There are problems across the whole of music. As we have said, it is not specific to studios. There are the really big studios and, for sure, there is sometimes a cultural issue there in terms of the musicians who are booked and the kind of culture that can occur and, again, making sure there are clear reporting mechanisms. At the very small end, you can see that these are closed spaces. I thought it was quite an interesting suggestion earlier about studio sessions being recorded to make sure that any inappropriate behaviour is captured. Again, it is probably harder at the smaller level where they have less resources than at the big studio end where they probably have more policies and procedures in place and there are just more people around in general, but I have had issues reported to me from that world.
Jen Smith: Chair, if I may add, the Music Producers Guild that represents studio spaces has come to us. It is supportive of CIISA and recognises our role in helping it deal with this challenge. We have a fundamentally important role to play in prevention. That is what will change culture. We acknowledge that these are unsafe spaces and there is a recognition, particularly about how studios address this. That is one of the practical interventions we will take, working with partners in the sector, to drive up change.
Q51 Chair: Deborah, do you have anything to add?
Deborah Annetts: Again, going back to the Dignity at work 2 report, we found that there was discrimination and sexual harassment absolutely everywhere, so it is not just within studios. I am just going to quote from that report, “on stage, in rehearsals, on tour buses, teaching in schools, at networking events, during performances and through unwanted social media messages” as well as within the orchestral space. So, there was absolutely nowhere where women were safe. Again, that comes back to this being a cultural issue.
Chair: Thank you. Christine, I am going to come to you now about licensing managers.
Q52 Christine Jardine: The previous Committee recommended that CIISA help to develop a mandatory accreditation programme for managers in music. How has this progressed since the report’s publication?
Jen Smith: We have worked with the Music Managers Forum, again another organisation that is proactively supporting CIISA. What we did is actually convene a cross-industry roundtable across the creative industries. We also had representatives from, for example, fashion and screen, looking at key roles that have safeguarding responsibilities and talking to those communities about what was the most appropriate route. Was it licensing? Was it accreditation? Was it additional training? That work continues but, again, it is another positive preventative asset that CIISA will bring in terms of assurance to people in key roles with responsibilities that they understand their safeguarding responsibilities and that there is independent oversight of that in terms of CIISA working with those providing the necessary oversight around accreditation, licensing and so on. So, there has been progress. That roundtable has met three times, and it will be one of the pieces of work that we will update the Committee on as we move forward.
Christine Jardine: Thank you.
Chair: Rachel on the Equality Act and employment law, please.
Q53 Rachel Taylor: Thank you. Deborah, the ISM and others have argued for the Equality Act to be amended to better protect freelancers. What changes would you like to see, and why?
Deborah Annetts: I am going to start off with the Equality Act as it stands. One of the issues we have is this fuzzy area around the term worker. What is a worker? Just in legal terms, there is not a lot of clarity around that and whether it extends as far as the concept of being a freelancer. That is particularly demonstrated around a section of the Equality Act, section 83, where it is not entirely clear, and we have taken a barrister’s opinion on whether that goes as far as protecting freelancers, and that is around discrimination. I would like to see this Government make it very clear that the equalities legislation extends across to freelancers. There is an unfortunate way of looking at rights within this current Government, that it is all about employment law. As so many of our workers are actually freelance, we need the Employment Rights Bill to go further and make it very clear that in its protections it is also protecting freelancers. That does not mean that we want people to be pushed into being self-employed, it is simply a recognition of how our sector actually works, and we want parity with the rights that are accorded to people who are employed.
We heard mention of this in relation to something called the maternity allowance. The way it is structured actually makes it much less fair if you are a self-employed woman who is pregnant and then gives birth, rather than an employed woman. You actually suffer an impediment by comparison to an employed woman. If an employed woman works on a self-employed basis and is paid, she does not suffer any detriment to her maternity pay. If a self-employed woman does that, she will suffer an impediment to her maternity allowance. I cannot see the justification for that, and I would like to see the Government look at the maternity allowance and take away that in-built inequity that sits within it. Given how much of our workforce is freelance, we really need maternity pay allowances to apply equitably to this female workforce, and we can give you chapter and verse on this. This is an issue that has been going on for quite some time with successive Governments.
We have talked about NDAs and that is something that needs to happen. We need to see them scrapped or time limited. Also, just coming back to third-party harassment—this is within the Employment Rights Bill at the moment—it is very much based around the employer having an obligation. What if there is no employer? What if the sexual harassment is done by a member of the audience? It is possible within our particular setting. We need the third-party harassment provisions to be broad enough to cover our sector because third-party harassment is really prevalent within our sector. Again, our model just does not fit the way employment works within the Employment Rights Bill. I wrote to the Cabinet Office after I had a meeting with them in October of last year and said, “These are the things that we need you to take on board,” and they all came out of Dignity at work 2. So far, we have not heard anything positive back. I chased them yesterday and they confirmed that no action has happened as yet. I would invite this Committee to perhaps follow up in relation to these provisions which would be of real value to our sector and, as I said, the statutory framework is part of tackling some challenges that we have within the music sector.
Q54 Rachel Taylor: Thank you. We have already covered the idea of introducing a ban on NDAs. Naomi, do you think there could be any negative consequences for women in music who have suffered abuse if NDAs were made illegal?
Naomi Pohl: I do not believe so. I know some people argue that there should be a choice for the survivor to ask for them, but what worries me is how coercive the industry is where there is a power imbalance. In my experience, it is much more likely that an NDA would be used to silence the survivor rather than the survivor looking to the NDA for protection. So, for me, yes, these measures would be very sensible and helpful.
Q55 Rachel Taylor: To what extent do you think that enacting the ban could contribute to a cultural shift in the industry where women could feel safe enough to report abuse? I will ask you first, Naomi, but then I would welcome other views too.
Naomi Pohl: We need to try to create a safe culture of reporting and there is safety in numbers if people start to speak out. Unfortunately, women are often prevented from speaking out because, again, if there is a financial imbalance they are afraid of being pursued for defamation. It is really important that they are not proactively silenced. Sometimes they contact us and say, “I can’t do anything about this because I am under an NDA,” and that should not be the case.
Jen Smith: This would be absolutely decisive leadership by the Government if they took forward a ban of the misuse of NDAs. They are often used as an extension of victimisation, and it is an immediate opportunity to make lasting and meaningful change which would prevent many future harms in the music industry and beyond. It is really important that this work is not mischaracterised in terms of what is being asked for, so should somebody who requests privacy in the face of abuse ask for that, it should be accommodated in the amendment. It is very important though that the misuse of NDAs is banned, and it would make a seismic immediate impact.
Deborah Annetts: I would agree with that. At the moment there is very little for a perpetrator to fear within the music sector and so you can see the perpetrator continuing with their inappropriate behaviours again and again and again. If we get rid of NDAs, that type of behaviour will be much more difficult to continue and I totally agree with Jen and Naomi, this would be a game changer for the music sector.
Q56 Kirith Entwistle: I just have one final question. The last Committee published its report a year ago. Has anything changed, either positive or negative, since then in the industry’s treatment of women? Are there any additional challenges that we need to be aware of when we take on the next stage of this?
Deborah Annetts: One positive change has been a change in Government, if I may say that. In relation to that last report, I know that the Chair of this Committee tried really hard to get the DCMS to take on board the recommendations, and every single recommendation was rejected. With a new Government in place, this is an opportunity to restate those recommendations and, given that we have an Employment Rights Bill out there and given that protected characteristics are being looked at, as well as the equalities legislation, it is such an opportunity for this Committee to make a real impact in relation to changing the way that culture and safety operates within the music sector at the moment.
Naomi Pohl: We have not seen major change in the industry. There are pockets of change. For example, LIVE was referenced, which is quite a new trade body for the live music industry and the CEO, who is a man, stood up on stage at the LIVE Awards and talked about women’s menstrual health on tour. I was like, “Yes, this is fantastic.” We need more male allies like that in positions of power who are willing to talk about issues that affect women. There are pockets of really positive change, but we need CIISA to be able to get up and running. That is going to require a sustainable funding model that it does not have at present, and it should not be voluntary in my view.
A couple of other things I wanted to mention: childcare could be tax deductible for the self-employed so that women can actually see that recognised as a cost of doing their jobs. We mentioned the maternity allowance—that needs to be increased, with the option to do more work because if you are a gigging freelancer, you need to do the odd gig in order to just keep your hand in. The recommendations in the previous report were so good we would just love to see them implemented, and I know Labour’s already made promises about looking into rights for the self-employed, but I know that it is waiting on the Employment Rights Bill happening first, so we really want to be involved in that piece of work to look into rights for the self-employed in more detail.
Jen Smith: I would just say the coalition of the willing in terms of those leaders showing the dynamic leadership and the collective courage required to drive forward CIISA is growing. The glaring gap in impartial, independent, safe, confidential advice remains evident with 91% of people who we surveyed in a snap survey of 800 creatives said they absolutely need CIISA, and 84% of them said that they would use it. There is absolute urgency for us to be open for business and we require your help and your continued support in doing so.
Chair: Thank you very much. That is a good place to end for today. I know that this has been a squeezed session, but if there is anything else that any of you think we should know and you have not had the opportunity to be able to say it, please do write in and follow up with written evidence; it will always be gratefully received. Thank you very much. That brings today’s proceedings to a close.