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Every summer, Tomorrowland becomes a global phenomenon. Widely regarded as one of the biggest festivals in the world, it is an enormous showcase for the artists who manage to perform there, or even better, to open or close the Mainstage. Their sets are heavily shared across social media and often become part of dance music history.
Like every year, I scroll through the comments. And there it is. Even there. Even when these women are performing in front of thousands of people at one of the most prestigious festivals in the world, they are still being belittled, labelled as incompetent, and constantly accused of stealing their own success.
This level of exposure reminds us just how rarely women are spared. Whether we’re talking about the new generation of DJs or the veterans, it’s always the same story. But let’s be honest, this isn’t the first time we’ve talked about sexism on social media, or in DJ culture. What interests me the most about this kind of stupid, pointless injustice isn’t simply the fact that it exists. It’s how it works, and why.
Every video of Sara Landry or NOVAH follows the exact same script. Every time you open the comments, you already know what you’re going to find.
“USB DJ.”
“Ghost producer.”
“She doesn’t even touch the mixer.”
“Beauty privilege.”
At this point you’d think it was some kind of running joke. Except… it runs, but nobody’s laughing anymore. Why does this suspicion come back every single time, even though it’s incredibly easy to dismantle these arguments? In DJing, sexism isn’t disappearing anytime soon (a little fatalistic, I know, but what can you do?). And that’s because it’s built on mechanisms that have been around for decades ( centuries?)
Sexism Has Gone Professional, and Digital
For a long time, being openly misogynistic required at least a bit of guts (and yes, in most cases, literally). You had to look a female artist in the eye and tell her she had no business standing behind a pair of CDJs. We can safely assume that happened countless times.
Today, courage isn’t required anymore. A fifty-year-old dad’s Facebook profile will do just fine. Or, if you’ve got absolutely no shame, you leave a comment under Sara Landry’s video explaining how a DJ mixer works. As if she wasn’t an engineer, after all. Social media didn’t invent sexism. It simply gave it a comment section.A little over a month ago, DJ Schnake used an expression that stuck with me:”The presumption of incompetence.”
Whether she realised it or not, she was putting words to a concept that sociologists have been describing for decades. And it’s probably the most accurate way of defining what women DJs experience today. Because honestly… how are they supposed to escape it?
Stay invisible, and nobody books you. Become visible, and people will explain that’s the only reason you got booked. Certainly not because of your music.
Why do we instinctively doubt a woman when she’s operating machines?
Without getting too deep into theory, sociology offers a few answers. Researchers like Judy Wajcman have shown that activities involving technology have nothing inherently masculine about them (in other words: no, men are not naturally born better at this stuff). However, they have historically been imagined, taught and valued as if they were. Engineering, mechanics, computer science and the sciences more broadly have long been constructed as worlds where technical mastery became a marker of masculinity.
This representation is rooted in an old opposition: on one side, the rational man, associated with logic and mastery over machines, on the other, the woman, associated with intuition, sensitivity and emotion. There is absolutely no scientific basis for this distinction. Yet stereotypes have this peculiar ability to keep shaping the way we see the world long after science itself has disproven them (ironically, through the very logic they claim to defend). It’s absurd. We know it’s false, yet it survives. Even if one day we proved that women are, on average, more intuitive than men, we could never conclude that intuition prevents them from thinking logically.
So women constantly find themselves fighting, behind the decks or anywhere else, to prove they belong in spaces that are still perceived as not being theirs. Even when they’re standing on Tomorrowland’s Mainstage, there are still people ready to question whether they deserve to be there. It’s enough to make you pull your hair out. CDJs are simply the modern, musical version of a very old story we’ve clearly not finished hearing. Which brings us to another question.
Why do we feel the need to find an alternative explanation for a woman’s success?
A woman’s success often feels less “natural” than a man’s. Instead of being attributed to her work, her skills or her dedication, it is more easily explained away by external factors: her looks, the algorithm, marketing, connections, or the convenient quota some people imagine festivals need to fill to pretend they care about diversity. Or maybe she has a ghost producer. Maybe the set was prerecorded.
This bias goes far beyond electronic music. In 2012, psychologist Corinne Moss-Racusin conducted a now-famous experiment in which recruiters and science professors evaluated the exact same CV differently depending on whether it carried the name John or Jennifer. John was considered more competent, more promising and deserving of a higher salary, despite the applications being strictly identical for a position associated with “masculine” skills. If something as simple as a first name can change our perception of competence, why would promoters, labels or bookers be completely immune to these same biases when choosing between two DJs with comparable careers, especially when we’re talking about artists who haven’t yet reached superstar status?
There is another hypothesis that also sheds light on the way female DJs are perceived across social media. It comes from social psychologist Madeline Heilman, who has been studying these mechanisms for more than twenty years.
In one of her landmark papers, Description and Prescription: How Gender Stereotypes Prevent Women’s Ascent Up the Organizational Ladder, Heilman argues that in environments traditionally perceived as masculine, success itself can become a transgression. She writes that women in these roles “may be penalized if they do their jobs well and are applauded as competent and successful.“
It’s a vicious circle. The more positive recognition a woman receives, the more frustration it generates among those who refuse to acknowledge her legitimacy. The machine feeds itself. According to Heilman, these take the form of “social sanctions.“ An accumulation of countless small reactions: being perceived as less likeable, less legitimate, less pleasant to work with, less professionally desirable. In one of the studies she reviews, a high-performing woman is judged to be just as competent as a man doing the exact same job, yet significantly less appreciated.
When a female DJ is just starting out, she’s told she doesn’t know how to mix. When she headlines Tomorrowland, signs to the biggest labels and tours the world, it somehow gets even worse. She becomes easier to hate. Or people stubbornly keep insisting she’s not actually that talented. In other words, when a woman succeeds, the process often follows the same pattern: first, her competence is questioned. Then, the attacks become personal. Rumours start validating one another until they become accepted as truth, and she ends up being less appreciated simply because she’s successful. A mechanism made infinitely more powerful by social media.
Despite all this, it would be dishonest to pretend this applies equally to every female artist, or to every woman. Professional circles, social background, ethnicity, religion and many other factors can either amplify or reduce these mechanisms. Above all, this is an intersectional issue, one that deserves to be studied in its own right within electronic music.
What remains certain, however, is that if we genuinely want to fight these biases, we first need to name them. To debunk them. To understand them. And then to keep dismantling them with exactly the same persistence that haters use to keep them alive. After all, if haters can spend decades manufacturing myths, the least we can do is spend a few minutes dismantling them.
Sources :
Wajcman, J. (1991). Feminism Confronts Technology. Penn State University Press.
Moss-Racusin, C. A., Dovidio, J. F., Brescoll, V. L., Graham, M. J., & Handelsman, J. (2012). Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 109(41), 16474-16479. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211286109
Heilman, M. E. (2001). Description and Prescription: How Gender Stereotypes Prevent Women’s Ascent Up the Organizational Ladder. Journal of Social Issues, 57(4), 657-674.
Heilman, M. E. (1983). Sex Bias in Work Settings: The Lack of Fit Model.
photos credits : IG @tommorowland, @novah.music