‘Many doors were slammed in our face’: Spice Girl Mel B speaks of music industry sexism in the 1990s

Spice Girl Melanie Brown, better known as Mel B or Scary Spice, has spoken of the sexism that the girl group faced in a male-dominated music industry during the 1990s.

Speaking to CNBC’s Tania Bryer, Brown, who became a member of the iconic British pop group upon its formation in 1994, talked about a struggle to be taken seriously.

“We entered into the industry at a time when it was all boy bands and so many doors were slammed in our face like ‘girl bands are not going to work’ and we’d be like ‘yes they are, you’ll see when we’re rich and famous,'” Brown said last month in an episode of “The CNBC Conversation.”

“But we were just on a mission, and we managed to do it.”

The iconic band was put together by Heart Management, which held auditions for a girl group that would compete with popular British boy bands at the time. The group is made up of five members: Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Emma Bunton, Geri Halliwell-Horner, and Victoria Beckham.

The group’s “girl power” mantra attracted a young, mainly female fanbase and launched them to the top of the charts.

The Spice Girls’ debut single “Wannabe” in 1996 was a number one hit in around 30 countries and the first album “Spice” became the world’s top-selling album of 1997. The group has gone on to sell more than 85 million records worldwide.

“We wrote all of our own songs so we’d all be there writing lyrics together going ‘no we need to empower women, we need to make sure that girls don’t feel like they have to conform to this or to that,'” Brown told CNBC.

“When we came out in the early 90s it was still very male predominant, you know, every interview, every board meeting that we went to, it was all male, and now you do see women in positions of power, not enough, not clearly enough, but it is changing,” she added.

There have been incremental improvements in gender diversity in the music industry scene in the U.K. The 2024 Glastonbury Festival featured two female headlining acts for the first time in its over 50-year history

Meanwhile, the U.K. Music Diversity Report 2024, which surveyed 2,874 people working behind the scenes of the music industry, found that women in senior positions had risen from 40.4% in 2020 to 48.3% in 2024.

However, gender equity in the music industry still has a long way to go. The report also found that women were more likely to be paid less than men. Overall, 55% of respondents who said they were unpaid were women, and only 30% of male respondents said the same.

On the other hand, 53.2% of men were earning more than £100,000 (roughly $131,000) while only 43.4% of women were also earning as much or more.

Additionally, 51% of women in the U.K. music industry have said they experienced discrimination while working as a musician, compared with only 6% of men, according to the 2024 Women Musicians Insight Report collated by Musician’s Census.

Almost a third of female respondents said they were sexually harassed while working as a musician compared with 5% of men, per Musician’s Census.

Chisholm has previously said that the group’s “girl power” slogan was inspired by their struggles with gender discrimination in the industry, according to an interview with outlet Female First in 2018.

“When we started, we were a pop group and we just wanted to sing and be famous and travel the world and we never really thought about that side of things at all. But, as soon as we were heading into the music industry, we started to be faced with some sexism. We were told girls don’t sell,” Chisholm said.

“It gave us even more determination to succeed because we realised very early on, we weren’t just doing it for ourselves and each other, we were doing it for girls. Being told we couldn’t do something was like a red rag to a bull to the Spice Girls,” she added.