I was listening to a rock playlist the other day as I worked. I like music when I’m working and it’s usually instrumentals only but I fancied a bit of a singalong as I was grazing the internet and looking for the interesting stuff.

First on the list were Fleetwood Mac and I hummed along to ‘Go Your Own Way’, annoying people around me in the process. Absorbed in the tunes, I got to the 30th track and Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’ started playing. I paused my work and realised that on the intervening 28 tracks there had not been a single female artist. There were songs ABOUT women, and TO women, but not BY women.

I was looking at an event which was on last week as part of my grazing and there seemed to be an equal number of male and female speakers. A bit of digging however, and the keynotes were all men, the end of day sessions were all men, the sessions with single speakers were all men. There were a few panels and that’s where the women were. Their photos featured prominently on the speakers pages – their presence on the agenda not so much.

This stuff still matters.

You can say the music was from a more sexist era in the 60s and 70s, but the attitudes are still there, however much people claim things have changed.