In the interest of balance

This year's Primavera festival was widely praised for its gender-balanced bill - but are 50/50 quotas really helpful or sufficient in destabilising male dominance of the music industry? Are they genuinely transformative or merely a box-ticking exercise?

In a piece for The Conversation (a site I really should have explored before), Samantha Warren of the University of Portsmouth suggests that the reality is actually quite complicated. While such quotas can increase opportunity and visibility for female musicians, they can also be divisive and ultimately other structural shifts are necessary to ensure the male and female talent pools are more evenly sized.