Pickathon Aims For Gender Parity Along With Great Music, Food - Forbes

As travelers flock to summer music festivals throughout the country, organizers of an upcoming festival in Oregon have had more on their minds than the many musical acts scheduled to perform.

The Pickathon festival outside Portland, scheduled for Aug. 1-4, offers meals prepared by top local chefs and aims for gender parity when booking performers and employees.

Pickathon organizers team up the chefs and musicians prior to the festival with an aim “to challenge each artist to create something beautiful, unpredictable and unique.” The chefs establish a menu based on discussions with the musicians and a food provider, “drawing inspiration from the artists’ music."

Festival attendees, who pay extra for a 90-minute meal, enjoy a special performance by the musicians and a multi-course meal served by a chef and a featured bartender.

The chef and the musical artist “draw inspiration from each other and push each other to new heights,” festival organizers say. “The result is a magical experience, a festival within a festival.”

Another unique aspect of Pickathon, which this year will feature such artists as Phil Lesh, Nathaniel Rateliff, Lucius, Sudan Archives and Laura Veirs, is its aim for gender parity. Organizers say this year’s festival will feature “44% female/non-binary artists.”

Pickathon's founder, Zale Schoenborn, says “it’s known nationwide that the female representation at music festivals is a real problem,” and his festival this year is “closer than ever to having gender parity.”

According to a 2018 survey by a music website, Pitchfork, female performers accounted for only 19% of the performers at 19 festivals last year.

"Unlike other festivals that simply constitute having a woman or non-binary band member in the background as celebrating female/non-binary artists, Pickathon only considers acts non-male centric if a band features a woman or non-binary person front and center,” Schoenborn says.

During the past several years, one-third to two-thirds of Pickathon’s office staff have been women, he says.

“We are also lucky enough to have women and female-identifying individuals at many levels of management at the festival,” says Schoenborn, a former mandolin player in the Colorado band Soul Tractor “Of the thousands of people who work at Pickathon to produce the festival, women frequently lead teams and manage many volunteers and workers.

“We don’t craft our teams at the festival based on gender, but we do believe that women must be involved at every level,” he says. “Our Treeline Stage last year was almost entirely staffed by women, a huge rarity in a music industry that does little to encourage women in the technical craft of sound engineering, stage managing and festival production.”

Pickathon presents music on four stages and in two barns at Pendarvis Farm, located in Happy Valley, about 13 miles southeast of Portland. The festival organizers say they are committed to “sustainable practices,” and their festival is the only one in the USA that has eliminated single-use cups, bottles, dishes and utensils.

“I founded Pickathon in 1999 on the simple idea of creating a better party!” Schoenborn exclaims. “Twenty years later, we evolved our focus to the more Olympic-size effort of creating the best festival experience in the world.”

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