Male visual artists are nearly twice as likely as their female peers to have their work featured in an exhibition, according to a new study from scholars at Northeastern University in Boston, the University of Virginia, and Yale University.
The authors examined the exhibition history of 65,768 visual artists participating in 378,517 exhibitions at 20,389 institutions around the world. They restricted their focus to contemporary active artists who began exhibiting in 1990 and afterwards. Of the sample, 41,738 artists were men and 24,030 were women, resulting in a ratio of 1.74 men artists for every one woman artist. Beyond this population disparity, the authors also found an exhibition disparity; men artists in the sample were exhibited 662,517 times, while women artists were exhibited only 355,506 times, resulting in an exhibition gender ratio of 1.86.
The research team also analyzed gender equality at the sample’s museums and galleries using two measurements: gender neutrality (the expectation that all artists, regardless of gender, should have the same equitable access to exhibition opportunities) and gender balance (achieving a 50/50 gender ratio in both population and representation in art). According to the study, some 57.80 percent of the art institutions are gender-neutral and only 24.46 percent are gender-balanced. Overall, both gender neutrality and gender balance are slightly stronger at museums than they are at galleries. Notably, male artists are more likely to be featured in more prestigious institutions.
In addition to gaps in overall representation, the authors identified severe disparities in the art auction market. They found that 10,179 men and 3,761 women artists recorded at least one sale at auction, resulting in a disparity of 2.71 — significantly larger than both the population disparity and the exhibition disparity. The gap is even larger when analyzing the number of auctioned items. Of the 125,682 auction records, 81.74 percent are for art created by men. Looking at total auction sales, the authors found a sales disparity of 7.54 in favor of men.
“In the 21st century, our society continues to struggle with gender imbalance and its implication — from business to science, men outnumber women, often dramatically. Art is no exception, classical art (nineteenth century and before) being represented by virtually all men, and contemporary art continues to struggle with gender-balance despite considerable efforts to acknowledge and correct it,” the authors write.
“Taken together,” the authors conclude, “our results suggest that to establish gender equality in art, it is not enough to only focus on enhancing the number of women artists, we must also break down the strong institutional representation inequalities which is related to artist mobility between institutions based on the artist’s gender.”