Four in five women working in the events industry have experienced harassment on site, according to the Network of Women in Events CIC’s (NOWIE) Big Survey 2026. The survey found 61% did not report their most serious incident, and almost one in five have left a role or turned down work because of safety or harassment concerns.
Now in its second year, the survey gathered responses from more than 500 event professionals, including 476 women, developed with NOWIE’s Expert Panel, UN Women UK and research partner Ipsos, short of the 1,000-plus responses NOWIE had targeted.
The findings reveal a stark gap in perception: 86% of women say the industry feels safe or mostly safe, yet 80% report having experienced harassment on site themselves. 83% don’t know what happens to a perpetrator once a report is made, while 98% said they would use, or consider using, an independent, confidential reporting body.
NOWIE’s first survey, in 2025, measured a narrower issue, sexual assault specifically, and found roughly one in four women had experienced it at work. The figures aren’t directly comparable, but both point to the same pattern: freelance and multi-employer working arrangements that leave women reluctant to report for fear of losing future work.
Cat Kevern, managing director of NOWIE, said the findings expose a contradiction the industry needs to address: “Most women tell us they feel safe working in events, yet four in five have experienced harassment on site. 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.”
Tabitha Morton, executive director of UN Women UK, said the missing piece was infrastructure: “Reporting routes nobody trusts, safeguarding that stops at the office door, and a workforce that existing systems were never built to reach. Safety is built, not assumed.”
NOWIE is launching a follow-up programme, Safe to Work, to turn the findings into practical measures on prevention, reporting and training.
The full report is available here: https://www.nowie.org/big-survey