The 2026 lineup setback: why fewer women are being booked

Just glance at the top of electronic music's booking charts in 2026 and you'd get the impression gender representation in the scene has never been better, that a decades-old imbalance has finally been fixed for good. Amelie Lens, Peggy Gou, Charlotte de Witte and Nina Kraviz are among the most in-demand names on the global circuit, headlining festivals that decades ago would have barely reserved a prime-time main stage slot for a woman. But that visibility at the very top of the pyramid hides a far less encouraging picture once you look at the base: according to recent complaints from within the scene itself, gender diversity across lineups as a whole is actually going backward.

A setback the numbers are starting to confirm

The IMS Electronic Music Business Report 2025/26, one of the most respected data sources on the global electronic music industry, brought a telling indicator of this disconnect. According to the report, women represent 15% of AlphaTheta's registered user base — the manufacturer behind widely used DJ gear, including controllers and mixers in the Pioneer DJ line — up from 13% in 2023. At first glance, a two-percentage-point increase over three years might seem like progress, but the sheer slowness of that pace exposes the size of the structural imbalance that still exists: even after years of public discourse about diversity, women continue to represent a very small share of who is actually operating the profession's technical equipment.

That equipment-adoption figure matters because it functions as an indirect but revealing proxy for how many women are actually entering and staying in the technical practice of DJing — not just performing occasionally, but building an ongoing career behind the decks. And it's precisely at that broader layer of the industry, below the absolute top occupied by already-established names, where the alarm started ringing louder in 2026.

The pattern observed in electronic music isn't an isolated case: other fields with a strong technical component, from studio production to live sound engineering, have historically also shown very low female presence, even when women's presence as performers or vocalists was never in question. The DJ booth occupies a particular place on that spectrum, because it combines live performance — an area where women have always been present in music generally — with technical mastery of equipment, an area historically treated as male territory by default. Breaking that double barrier takes more than visibility from a few stars — it takes changes in how technical learning itself is offered, encouraged and validated within the scene, from the first steps with a controller all the way to defending a set on a professional lineup.

The open letter that exposed the scene's discomfort

It was exactly that contrast between the shine at the top and stagnation at the base that pushed UK collective NOT BAD FOR A GIRL to publish, in 2026, an open letter denouncing what they described as a setback in the gender diversity of club and festival lineups. The letter points to falling bookings not just for cis women, but also for trans and non-binary people — groups that, according to the collective, had been gradually gaining ground in the scene in prior years and are now seeing that progress lose momentum or even reverse in certain circuits.

The letter reignites a tension the electronic scene has never fully resolved: the fact that having a handful of extremely successful women at the top of the circuit doesn't automatically translate into a structurally more equitable industry. Promoters can point to Amelie Lens or Charlotte de Witte as proof that "the scene has changed," while in practice the number of women, trans people and non-binary artists booked for secondary stages, less prime-time slots and smaller club events remains disproportionately low compared to their male peers.

Part of the explanation for that contrast, according to those who study the scene's booking patterns, lies in dynamics less visible than a simple willingness to book more diversely: informal referral networks among promoters, agents and producers tend to reproduce the same familiar contacts, and women, trans people and non-binary artists often get left out of exactly the informal trust circuits that decide who gets a first shot at a major festival. Without structural change in those behind-the-scenes networks, growth at the top of the lineup is unlikely to translate into equivalent growth at the intermediate and early-career layers of a DJ's path.

Four names at the top don't make an equitable industry — they make four exceptions that prove the rule.

The challenge facing the scene in 2026 is exactly that: turning the undeniable success of its biggest female stars into real pressure for broader structural change, rather than letting those names serve as a comfortable alibi to postpone the harder conversation about who actually has regular access to the booth, the stage and the mic at every level of the industry — from the festival mainstage to the neighborhood club.

Part of the response activists and collectives like NOT BAD FOR A GIRL have been proposing involves concrete changes to how lineups get built: minimum representation quotas at festivals, technical mentorship programs aimed at women and non-binary people looking to break into DJing, and greater public transparency about the gender composition of event posters themselves. Without that kind of organized, sustained pressure, they argue, the real risk is that the electronic scene keeps publicly celebrating its exceptions of success while the base of the professional pyramid stays practically unchanged year after year — a problem that isolated growth numbers, however modest, can't solve on their own.