This feminist study investigates critically analyses the human resource management (HRM) paradigms of Ireland’s music organisations, and the impact of these paradigms upon the lived realities of male and female workers. With no prior feminist studies of Ireland’s music organisations, this study opens a new line of inquiry for feminist organisational research in Ireland’s music industries Prior to this study, music organisations in Ireland had never been researched from a feminist perspective and were an undefined population with no centralised information about how many there are and how many people are employed by them. This study quantifies the population of music organisations in Ireland and their workforce. By mapping music organisations’ overall gender and race divisions of labour, their racial homogeneity is brought to light in parallel with gender as the most salient marker of difference. Music organisations in Ireland make public commitments towards ‘equality’ and ‘equal opportunity’ and express their compliance with legal obligations towards the nondiscriminatory treatment of workers. On a global level, music organisations with these same public commitments operate alongside news stories that continually report contradictory practices that sustain harmful cultures for workers, and particularly for female workers. Through a mixed methods approach using interview and survey, this study investigates how music organisations manage labour relationships with HRM paradigms. With the combined theoretical framework of Raewyn Connell (2021, 2011) and Joan Acker (2006), the gender effects of HRM in managing the relationship between the organisation and male and female workers is brought to light. Management’s reliance on a neoliberal, market-oriented HRM solution for gender divisions of labour and harmful cultures maintains patriarchal gender relations rather than remedying them. Lived realities of workers contradict the organisation’s commitments to ‘equality’ and ‘equal opportunity’. A new feminist theorisation of paradox is produced from analysis of this contradiction which challenges the dominance and legitimacy of the HRM paradigms of music organisations.