Four in Five Women in Events Faced Harassment on Site, Survey Finds

Four in five women in events faced harassment on site at an event in Britain's live events industry, according to the Big Survey 2026, a UK-wide study released in October 2026 by the Network of Women in Events (NOWIE). The anonymous survey, developed with UN Women UK and research partner Ipsos, drew 519 responses and found that 62 percent of women had endured comments about their appearance, catcalling or whistling while working, while a third reported unwanted physical contact and six percent reported sexual assault on site. The full report is available at nowie.org/big-survey.

The numbers sit uncomfortably beside what workers say they feel. According to the survey, 86 percent of women described the industry as safe or mostly safe, even as 80 percent said they had been harassed while doing their jobs. Cat Kevern, NOWIE's managing director, said that contradiction is exactly what the research was built to confront. "We don't want The Big Survey to become an annual exercise where we publish difficult statistics and then come back a year later to see whether anything has changed," she said, adding that the question now is what the industry does with the evidence. Trade press Conference News reported that 519 people took part, including 476 women, falling short of the 1,000-plus responses NOWIE had aimed for.

A reporting system nobody trusts

The survey's most damning finding is not the harassment itself but what happens after it. Sixty-one percent of women did not report their most serious incident, and 83 percent said they did not know what happens to a perpetrator once a report is made. Across every venue type, from conferences to festivals, women in events faced harassment that went unreported because the routes to complain were unclear or untrusted. Nearly everyone, 98 percent, said they would use or consider using an independent, confidential reporting body. The reason for the silence is economic as much as cultural: almost one in five respondents said they had left a role or turned down work because of safety or harassment concerns.

Tabitha Morton, executive director of UN Women UK, which wrote the foreword to the report, said the gap is infrastructure, not awareness. "Safety is built, not assumed," she said. She described reporting routes that nobody trusts, safeguarding that stops at the office door, and a workforce that is freelance, itinerant and public-facing, in other words one that existing systems were never built to reach. MP Jo Platt also endorsed the survey's push for stronger protections, and the findings were presented at an industry launch event at Church House Westminster on October 15.

Freelancers carry the risk, not the protection

The data shows the risk is shared evenly but the protection is not. Thirty-eight percent of respondents were freelance or self-employed, and freelance women reported on-site harassment at almost the same rate as employed women. Yet only 28 percent of freelancers knew of a clear reporting process, compared with 64 percent of those in permanent employment. Temporary contracts, multiple employers, touring schedules and public-facing venues mean there is often no single company with safeguarding responsibility and no clear line to report to, while the fear that complaining will cost future bookings keeps many quiet. Because women in events faced harassment at similar rates whether employed or freelance, the gap in reporting routes points to structure, not behavior.

The pattern is not new, though this year's questions went wider. NOWIE's first survey in 2025 focused specifically on sexual assault and found roughly one in four women had experienced it in connection with events work, with more than 600 women taking part. This year's survey broadened the scope to all forms of on-site harassment and asked about reporting and accountability for the first time, so the headline figures cannot be directly compared, but both years point to the same mechanism: precarious working arrangements leaving women reluctant to speak up.

What happens next

The survey was deliberately timed to feed into the UK government's Freedom from Violence and Abuse strategy, published in December 2025, which sets a ten-year ambition to halve violence against women and girls. NOWIE aligned its research with that strategy, and UN Women UK's foreword places the industry findings in the national conversation about preventing violence against women and girls. The same demand for protection is being heard elsewhere: femicide protests in Cameroon are pressing for new laws as killings mount, and newcomer girls in Canada are reporting the steepest drop in mental health.

NOWIE's answer to its own data is a programme called Safe to Work, designed to turn the survey evidence into prevention, reporting mechanisms, training and clear safeguarding responsibility across the sector, with policy templates, designated safeguarding leads and industry-specific training built collaboratively rather than imposed top-down. A cross-industry coalition including Trivandi, Major Events International, ResponSec, the Purple Guide and the Ask for Angela initiative has backed the research. "We all share a responsibility to keep it safe, fair and open to everyone who works in it," said James Bulley, chief executive and co-founder of Trivandi.

For young women eyeing careers behind the scenes, from festival production to conference management, the survey is a blunt briefing on the workplace they are entering: a sixty-billion-pound industry, according to Event Industry News, where the work is project-based, the hours are long and the safeguarding has not kept pace. One caveat is worth keeping in mind. The sample was self-selecting, recruited through NOWIE's community channels and industry media, and one trade outlet noted it should not be read as a precise industry-wide estimate. Even so, the direction of travel is hard to dismiss: two years running, the women who build Britain's events say the same thing, and this year they have named exactly what would make them trust the system enough to report.