Why we did this
We wanted to celebrate the female DJs in our scene
But we’re also aware that there’s an imbalance behind the decks, one we’ve heard, and been part of discussions about.
We didn’t know the actual scale of it however, until we decided to put together this piece in honour of Women’s Day, and turned to our data to find out.
Before we get into it
This is our data, not an audit of the whole scene
What follows is pulled from our own records - the events we’ve featured and promoted on our website and Weekend Guides over the past two years. It’s not an audit of every event in Cape Town, and it won’t capture everything happening in the scene.
But it’s the most complete picture we personally have, and it’s a lot more solid than the impression we walked in with.
For clarity, gender was inferred from names and stage identity. B2B pairings were counted as separate bookings. Around 2.8% of sets remain unresolved / were excluded from the dataset due to reasons such as artists being non-binary / not publicly identifying their gender.
Sound Guide event records · 2025 full year vs 2026 to date
The headline numbers
It’s not a collapse. It’s a slide.
In 2025, female DJs took 12.2% of bookings across the year - 704 out of an available 5,785 DJ sets. In 2026 to date that figure is 11.5%, or 633 out of a possible 5,515.
0.7% doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a slide in the wrong direction, and it’s happening while the scene itself is growing. 2026 is a partial year that has already logged nearly as many DJ sets as all of 2025 did.
And that growth isn’t us loosening what we cover. We logged 5.13 DJs per lineup in 2026 against 5.12 in 2025 - the same depth, just far more events. Meanwhile the DJ roster has barely changed: 1,834 male DJs booked so far in 2026, against 1,850 across the whole of last year. More slots, largely the same DJs.
The scene is growing. The share shrank.
2026 is a partial year - absolute counts are not like-for-like with 2025. Female DJs took 12.2% of all DJ sets in 2025 and 11.5% so far in 2026 - a 0.7 point slide.
Where the gap isn’t
Once they’re in, they get rebooked
We checked whether female DJs were being booked once and quietly dropped. They aren’t - if anything they’re rebooked slightly more often than male DJs.
- 3.07 bookings per female DJ in 2026
- 2.58 bookings per male DJ in 2026
- 29 artists account for half of all female bookings (28 in 2025)
Where the gap is
It isn’t retention. It’s entry.
206 distinct female DJs were booked across 2026 so far, against 1,834 male DJs. A further 85 acts could not be resolved.
It reflects who’s already in the pipeline, already on a promoter’s radar. Whatever happens after that point is happening within a pool that was already narrow.
To be clear
This isn’t an argument for handouts
The female DJs we spoke to don’t want opportunities handed over to fill a quota. They want to earn them.
Widening who gets a first look isn’t lowering the bar. It’s making sure the bar gets applied to more people.
A question our data can’t answer
We measure who gets booked. Not who’s trying to get booked.
Everything here counts bookings. It says nothing about how many women are actually out there trying to DJ in the first place.
If the pool of women pursuing DJing is itself smaller than the pool of men, for whatever reason, then a narrower roster wouldn’t only reflect who’s being overlooked - it would partly reflect who’s in the running to begin with.
We don’t have the data to answer that. What we can say is that a 206-female-to-1,834-male split feels wider than any reasonable estimate of that gap would explain on its own.
Not all decline
The one number moving the right way
More individual female DJs are entering the scene than at any point in our dataset - 206 so far in 2026, up from 193 across all of 2025, while the male roster edged down from 1,850 to 1,834. The female share of the booked roster is up 0.6 points, from 9.1% to 9.7%.
More female DJs are getting through the door. They just aren’t getting a bigger share of the room.
What we take from this
“Just be in the room” isn’t the same ask for everyone
So much of who gets booked comes down to who’s already visible, who’s already in a promoter’s circle. That’s usually described as a networking problem - show up, get known, become a familiar name.
It’s worth pausing on that advice rather than just repeating it. Showing up to events alone, and often late at night, doesn’t carry the same risk for everyone.
We’re not going to speak for anyone else’s experience. But it’s a fair question to sit with: if part of how you get booked is being present at enough of the right nights, is that path as accessible to women as it is to men? If the honest answer is no, that’s arguably part of the entry-point gap itself - not separate from it.
This isn’t a call-out. Most promoters we speak to genuinely want a more balanced scene.
So where do we go from here?
What can female DJs do about this?
For female DJs already in the scene, the data suggests the biggest lever isn’t working harder within the system. It’s already clear that the female DJs who get in are being rebooked at a healthy rate. This isn’t only about racking up more gigs, though. Once you’re in, being selective about which ones you take can matter just as much as how many you get, choosing lineups, promoters, and rooms that actually reflect where you want your name to sit.
It’s visibility outside the system that seems to move the needle: producing and releasing original music, playing sets that document well and travel online, showing up on other people’s radars before a promoter ever has to take a “risk” on booking someone new.
It’s also worth going back to what we’ve said before about what makes any DJ stand out early on: producing your own music, playing live, playing vinyl. Those differentiators apply just as much here. The more female DJs who show up with a genuine technical or creative edge alongside everything else, the sooner “female DJ” stops being read as a category of its own and just becomes one more DJ with something to offer.
There’s also a more direct option worth naming: throwing your own event. You don’t need to wait to be picked for a lineup that already exists, you can build one, book who you want on it, and put yourself on your own bill. Some of the strongest female-led movements in other scenes have started exactly this way.
We’re not saying any of this should be necessary. We’re saying that, right now, it appears to be one of the more reliable ways in.
No one group solves this alone
For female stakeholders (promoters, bookers, label heads, collective founders, anyone with a hand on a lineup) this is probably where the fastest movement is possible. You’re closer to the pipeline than anyone. That can mean actively widening your own scouting beyond the same 29 or so artists who already account for half of all female bookings, giving newer names a genuine first set rather than an opener nobody remembers, and being honest with peers when a lineup you’re looking at is 0% female by default rather than by design.
For male DJs, one option is supporting the spaces already doing this work rather than trying to solve it solo, showing up to and promoting showcases, collectives, or nights built around widening who gets a set. Attendance and word of mouth are underrated forms of support: a well-attended female-led night is the strongest possible signal to a promoter that there’s an audience for it, and that signal is easier to send collectively than individually.
For male stakeholders, who make up the majority of promoters, bookers and organisers we spoke to, the entry-point number is probably the most useful thing to sit with. 206 female DJs against 1,834 male DJs on the 2026 roster reflects who’s on people’s radar before a lineup even starts coming together, more than it reflects any individual booking decision. Nobody sets out to build an unbalanced bill; most promoters we speak to would say the opposite is true. But intention and outcome aren’t always the same thing, and the only way to know which one you’re actually getting is to check. That could mean setting aside time to listen to new sets and mixes before defaulting to familiar names, or asking peers who else is doing interesting work that deserves a set. Small, low-effort habits, but ones that, going by what the numbers show across the scene as a whole, aren’t yet common practice.
On this Women’s Day, look at the next lineup
To the female DJs already carving out space, and the ones still deciding whether there’s room for them: keep going. The door is narrower than it should be, but it does open.
To everyone else: before the next lineup goes out, whether you’re on it or building it, take a moment to think about who else’s music deserves to be heard. See how it measures up against the inclusive scene you’d say you believe in.
All we’re asking for is a little more conscious thought.
Images by Diary of Ross
