The Independent Society of Musicians (ISM), in collaboration with the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), has developed a sexual harassment toolkit specifically for orchestras. The free resource provides practical guidance on how to prevent, address and mitigate issues related to sexual harassment and bullying within the orchestral sector.
The toolkit was developed with the support of a group of stakeholders, including the Association of British Orchestras (ABO), Black Lives in Music, the F-List for Music, the Musicians Union and Orchestras Live. The ISM also worked with 16 orchestras from around the country to get a sense of how the toolkit can be most useful and have the most impact. The toolkit has been designed so you don’t have to be an orchestra to use it—it is relevant to all sorts of organisations across the music sector.
We interviewed Naomi McCarthy, Senior Policy and Campaigns Officer, as part of the External Affairs Department at the ISM. We learn more about the drivers behind the EDI resource, how it’s embedded within the ISM’s wider company strategy and some essential elements of the toolkit itself.
What are your motivations for addressing diversity and inclusion within your organisation?
It's a huge issue across the sector, which is something our own research has told us, as well as many reports from other organisations across the industry. The ISM’s own research into discrimination began in 2017 with the emergence of the Me Too movement, when musicians started to come forward and tell the ISM about their own stories. In 2018 we held a survey of the sector, asking musicians about their experiences of bullying and harassment, and got some very alarming results, which we published in our Dignity at Work and Dignity in Study reports. We realised we were going to have to do some work to raise awareness of the problem and push for change, to get the sector to clean up its act and the government to take action.
We held a follow-up survey in 2022, which received 660 responses. This showed that the problem had actually got worse since 2018. In 2022, 66% of the survey respondents had experienced bullying and harassment at work, which was up from 47% in 2018. 78% of the discrimination was committed against women and 58% of the discrimination described in the responses would be classed as sexual harassment. It may be the case that people became more willing to speak up in that time, but it's still not a good trend. This was one of our key motivations: it's time, in 2024, that we root out this kind of behaviour and make the music industry a safe place for everyone.
How are these motivations embedded into your wider company strategy?
EDI is always a key part of our business plan and we have our own code of conduct within the ISM for our members. In 2018, we collaborated with the Musicians’ Union to develop the ISM-MU Code of Practice, which is a set of principles to tackle and prevent bullying, harassment and discrimination in the music sector, and 140 organisations have now signed this code. We're also always mindful of the importance of inclusivity whenever we organise a panel, a roundtable discussion or similar event. It's incredibly central to what we do and we're constantly working towards improving it.
What do you believe the risks are of not addressing EDI within your organisation?
I think there's a reputational risk if we don't tackle this issue. It's something our members expect of us. Also, more broadly, it's important that we do this work to stop the narrowing of the talent pipeline into the industry.
Our research shows that people with protected characteristics of all types are most vulnerable to this kind of behaviour. There's so much gatekeeping in the industry too. We've got to chip away at this to allow anybody who wants a career in the industry to pursue their dream. If we don't, we'll end up with people deciding to leave the industry because it's just not working for them and they fear the consequences of speaking out.
How are you working towards your EDI goals?
What we're really focused on is making a practical difference, which is why we devised the Code of Practice with the MU. It's very easy to identify the problems, but what actually can you do to solve them?
This is why we decided to develop a toolkit for orchestras to help them address the issue of sexual harassment. In our research for the Dignity at Work 2 report we found some sectors have done good work in this area, including the hospitality sector, where the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has come up with good guidelines for supporting shift workers who are vulnerable to sexual harassment. We thought, well, this is something practical that could really help orchestras, who are key employers of musicians.
Can you tell us more about the orchestra toolkit?
This is a collaboration between the ISM and the EHRC. It's practical guidance that helps orchestras be proactive when they're addressing issues. A key focus of the toolkit is protection, so making sure orchestra managers or whoever is in charge of fixing musicians and looking at tours, etc., is conscious of safety at every stage, from booking musicians to the changing spaces, rehearsal spaces, what's going on in the pub afterwards, hotel room sharing, etc. It's about trying to secure those spaces as much as possible.
It's also about a better way of communicating with orchestra musicians. If you're a freelancer, for example, particularly if you're someone who's stepping in at the last minute as a replacement for another musician, you might have absolutely no idea about the procedures and policies in place in that orchestra, or who to report any discrimination to. The toolkit serves to remind orchestras to communicate with their performers at every stage.
The toolkit also aims to help orchestras think about what to do if they get a report of sexual harassment. What is the procedure? Who will deal with it? What are the consequences? It's not about telling orchestras what to do, it's helping them think about how to deal with an issue if it happens.
Could you tell us more about the key elements of the toolkit’s content?
The toolkit has an introduction that explains why this is such an important issue. It includes a section on sexual harassment and the law and specifically the Worker Protection Act, which came into force in October 2024. The Act increases the responsibilities of all employers to take 'reasonable steps' to protect their workers from harassment. We look at what those reasonable steps could be from the perspective of an orchestra and the role of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
Orchestras need to understand what their obligations and responsibilities are as employers. The toolkit also talks about freelancers, which is important because freelance musicians are particularly vulnerable to discrimination and most likely not to report any harassment that takes place.
The toolkit covers communication with your musicians, making sure they know who they can speak to if they do feel unsafe or if something happens. There's a separate section for time on tour because this is a specific danger area where things can happen with so many grey areas. A musician can feel trapped on tour and feel obliged to socialise, for example—if something happens in the pub after a concert, is this work or is this not work?
It includes a checklist that people can print out so it can be used as a very practical guide to the actions you can take before an orchestra session, during a session and afterwards, to keep musicians safe and ensure they can report any issues that occur.
Then finally, there are monitoring logs, so orchestras can record if anything happened on a tour, for example, and how it was dealt with—including what you could do better in future if things did go wrong. It's also a place to record feedback from musicians and learn how incidents can be dealt with better moving forward.
It's early to say but what are you hoping will make your approach successful?
We’ve deliberately made the toolkit really adaptable. So, it's not saying this is the blueprint, follow it exactly and you will be fine. It's saying these are the things to think about regardless of what type of orchestra you are. It's trying not to be dictatorial. We don't want orchestras to feel that we're preaching to them or telling them off for anything because we know it's hard. Getting the tone right has been a delicate task.
Also, we have worked with the orchestra sector to develop the toolkit, so I hope it feels like we're doing it together. The feedback we've had from the orchestras is that it's great and they're glad someone is doing this work. We also developed it with a stakeholder group, so it's not just us and the EHRC saying this is what we think the orchestra sector should be doing.
We hope that the majority of UK orchestras will be prompted to put measures in place to protect their musicians from sexual harassment, even if they don't officially adopt the toolkit. We really want to see them having proper procedures in place.
How are you planning to measure or assess the impact of the toolkit?
The EHRC are leading on this area of the work as they have their own monitoring processes. However, we've already set a benchmark by asking the orchestras who have helped us develop the toolkit a set of questions before they saw it about what they thought the barriers were to using something like this and what they thought the need was for it. Now the toolkit has been released, we will follow up to see what might have changed. We are also working with selected orchestras on trialling the toolkit.
What advice or key learning would you share with other organisations considering similar initiatives?
Try to work with as big a group of stakeholders as is practical. I'm an amateur musician myself and I've played in orchestras and I thought I knew that world pretty well. However, there have been some real eye-openers that have come out through the discussions of behaviour and issues that hadn't even crossed my mind. So, definitely involve key stakeholders and don't try and go it alone. Also, test it as much as you can before you release it because it's amazing what comes up when you actually start discussing the issues.