Roughly 75% of art teachers in America are women, meaning that three-quarters of students are first taught art by a woman. In our last article, we discussed how docents’ bases are largely comprised of white women. Most museum staff members are women, and galleries and auction houses are similarly staffed by women. In a world where gender inequality is pervasive, the Supreme Court is potentially rolling back rights, and women make 77 cents to a man’s dollar, the art world may seem like a refuge at first glance.
However, this representation disappears when you go up the hierarchy ladder, as “although women are well represented in the profession as a whole, they are not attaining the top jobs in a similar proportion. 1 Looking at top-selling artists and representation in galleries too, they are most often male.
Historically, the art world has been a male-dominated industry, as it was men who were both the patrons and artists involved in the buying and selling of the art of the ancient, medieval, and renaissance worlds. And, although women were always interested in art, and were even for certain classes expected to have a proficiency in painting and drawing to be considered “accomplished,” it is only in the past 100 years or so that women have been able to more consistently rise to the top as professional artists. Comparatively, then, the art world today may seem welcoming to women, but it is still very much a man’s world.
Museums
In 2015, the Association of Art Museum Directors did a survey of museums in the US. Of 211 surveyed museums the 90 female directors make up 42% of the pool. But, while that number is up from the 32% of women who directed museums surveyed in 2005, they still experience a pay gap and receive 79 cents to every dollar a male director earns. One explanation for this might be that among the museums in the 2015 survey, which had budgets ranging from under 1 million to over 100 million dollars, women were primarily directors of museums that had budgets under 15 million dollars. In 2005, women directed 32% of the museums surveyed 2. The three most visited museums in the world, the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City have never had a female director. There are theories as to why this happens; predominately male boards appoint a male director because they “don’t know who they might go to outside their own circle.3”
The gender inequality in museums bleeds from the staff to the art. In 2019, a survey was done of 10,000 artists across museums in the United States; 87% of those were male 4. There has been a movement to showcase female artists recently; the MFA had their Women Take the Floor exhibit to address this issue, but the leadership at the MFA is still male. Matthew Teitelbaum is the Director and Edward Greene is the President of the Board. Cathy Minehan is Chair of the Board, which is a step in the right direction, although both Greene and Minehan have been criticized for not being art collectors5.
Auctions
The inequality is on display more starkly at auction houses. 96% of artworks sold at auction are by male artists and “only two works by women have ever broken into the top 100 auction sales for paintings, despite women being the subject matter for approximately half of the top 25.6 ” Jenny Saville’s painting, Propped, broke the world record in 2018 at $12.5 million for sales by a living female artist. This was the same auction at which Banksy’s piece Girl with Balloon descended through the bottom of its frame and shredded after being sold to the astonishment of everyone in attendance, not least its buyer. Propped was hardly mentioned ever again.
Hope for the Future
All is not lost, however; “according to Artfinder, an online marketplace for 9,000 independent artists… women consistently outsell their male counterparts, and are the most popular picks for buyers. .7 ” In 2019, the Venice Biennale went from featuring 26-43% of women to featuring 53%. Museums are increasingly being led by women and those museums have increasingly larger budgets. There is room for improvement; women artists are outsold at auction, underrepresented in museums, and even though women earn almost three-quarters of the Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees and Master of Fine Arts degrees in the US, less than half of all working artists in the country are women8. These are not insurmountable obstacles, however. Museums, especially, have become very aware of the lack of female artists in their collections and have been working to rectify that in recent years. The auction world has many changes to make, one of which is better gender representation. We’ve discussed before that auction prices are increasingly getting out of hand, so auctions may undergo a large, systemic change as a whole, soon. There has been progressing in the last few years, and the expectation is that it will continue, but we must remain mindful and watchful and encourage industries to make the changes needed.
- Victoria Turner, “The Factors Affecting Women’s Success in Museum Careers: A Discussion of the Reasons More Women Do Not Reach the Top, and of Strategies to Promote Their Future Success,” Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies 8, no. 0 (November 1, 2002): 6–10, https://doi.org/10.5334/jcms.8022. ”
- “Get the Facts About Women in the Arts,” NMWA (blog), accessed April 21, 2022, https://nmwa.org/support/advocacy/get-facts/.
- Turner, “The Factors Affecting Women’s Success in Museum Careers.”
- UGAgradynewsource, “Gender Inequality in the Art World: What It Means for Three Local Art Spaces,” Grady Newsource (blog), February 28, 2020, https://gradynewsource.uga.edu/gender-inequality-in-the-art-world-what-it-means-for-three-local-art-spaces/.
- “The MFA, with Its Best-in-America Collections, Needs the Best Leadership,” National Review (blog), January 22, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/the-mfa-with-its-best-in-america-collections-needs-the-best-leadership/.
- “Why Is Work by Female Artists Still Valued Less Than Work by Male Artists? – Artsy,” accessed April 21, 2022, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-work-female-artists-valued-work-male-artists.
- Hannah Ellis-Petersen, “How the Art World Airbrushed Female Artists from History,” The Guardian, February 6, 2017, sec. Life and style, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/feb/06/how-the-art-world-airbrushed-female-artists-from-history.
- “Get the Facts About Women in the Arts.”