From
A Stage of Their Own: Women and Performance Poetry
by Angharad James, Planet 135:

Mention performance poetry in some literary circles and you'll discover that it can have the same offensive effect as swearing, for even a casual observer of the Anglo-Welsh literary scene will have noticed the heated arguments caused by this term. Some academics dismiss poetry produced by performance poets as nonsense, and a fair number of more conventional poets wouldn't wish to be seen dead in the same writers' group. I myself am a sympathiser, as a result, partly, of my research on performance poetry in Cardiff and south Wales, but also because of my own experience as a performer, albeit within a different field. I am drawn to these outsiders who push against traditional Anglo-Welsh stereotypes and give voice to the experience of a more urban, industrial Wales. I would be among the first to admit that some performance poetry is awful - but not all of it, and the genre as a whole is exciting and invigorating.

However, as a woman, I am often disappointed by the stumbling blocks put in the way of performance poets. Many artistic fields suffer from a lack of confident female practitioners, but in performance poetry, the problem is particularly acute. I am thinking specifically of Welsh women performance poets here, though the same trend can be seen elsewhere, as well as in other performance fields, especially stand-up comedy.

...Women come to performance poetry through a side-door, as it were, and step onto a stage already dominated by men. Ideas about what constitutes a good performer, an adequate performance, and a suitable performance space, have already been set by men and, more often than not, for men. As a result, much of the history of spoken poetry from the 1960s through to the '90s, in south Wales at least, is bound up with events like poems and pints evenings and the Red Poets Society gigs. Although it is not necessarily intentional, such events have been rooted in a macho Valleys culture into which women do not easily fit. Even the '90s phenomenon of the poetry slam has a noticeable imbalance in the percentage of male to female contestants...