20th C collections in public or private art museums
one person shows or group exhibitions organised in State-funded art galleries of modern/contemporary art
numbers of artists “represented by” commercial galleries
numbers of artists or art works included in international art biennales
numbers of female students in fine art education
numbers of women Professors
Attempts have been made to count the numbers of women artists and their works in terms of their presence and visibility in all these areas during the last forty years. Many of these studies have been national and most have been presented as numbers or percentages measured retrospectively.
The difficulty of collecting this data has meant that the studies that have been undertaken are very limited in their scope. These studies have relied on individual women activists going out to count and document their situation: very few have been conducted by the organisations themselves. These statistical snapshots of women artists’ presence frequently reveal a picture about one event, one exhibition, one publication or one year. Rarely are they put together to reveal changes over time – across the last forty years or more – or across countries and continents. This is why, these statistics remain limited, partial and incomplete. They are only snapshots.
What sources would you use to measure discrimination or account for women artists’ presence?
How would you assemble this information?
What evidence would you use:
National government surveys or tax declarations?
Numbers of students by gender?
Numbers of professors by gender?
Statistics about works by women artists in museums?
Numbers of one-person exhibitions in a year at all the galleries in one city?
Nos. of articles or exhibition reviews in art journals?
Works on show in the museum or hidden in the basement as part of its national collection?
Nos. of mentions or illustrations of women artists in art history textbooks?
The numbers of works shown produced by women artists in a major new exhibition?
The situation has changed from very low levels of under 10% representation in museums and galleries and major exhibitions of contemporary art in the 1970s to around 30% today: women artists are around 50% of artists in many countries. The focus on the work of women artists in the largest commercial galleries (between 10%-20%) and in art criticism remains low (around 20% of articles, interviews and reviews in art journals and newspapers).
Statistics have been used to make a case for change in feminist arguments about women artist’s position. These were political arguments and they made use of statistics to indicate what was wrong in the status quo (naming things as they are). The statistics challenged people’s perceptions of women’s representation and common assumptions people held about women’s visibility as cultural producers.
These political arguments were very powerful in presenting a case as to why change needs to happen and why we should be aware of sexism within the art world: they have also, like the Guerrilla Girls, been presented with fun and irony.
There have been many other feminist groups formed which have attempted the same approach:
Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) in 1970 protested for equal representation of women artists in the Whitney Annual (then Biannual) in New York.
WSABAL (Faith Ringgold and Michele Wallace) protested for equal representation of black women artists in not-for-profit galleries in 1970s.
PESTs (in the USA, late 1980s) (see Uri McMillan Embodied Avatars (NYU Press, 2015), one print in collection of Victoria and Albert Museum)
Fanny Adams (in the UK, 1992-1993) Archive of work
Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) (in the USA, early 1990s) Archive of work
Yes! Association/ Föreningen JA! (in Sweden, 2005-)
Magpies (in France, 2000s)
Brainstormers Report and Gallery Guide (New York, 2006) and Scene and Herd (New York, 2007)
East Fawcett Library survey (in 2010s, UK)
CoUNTesses (a blog in Australia, started 2008) and The Countess Report (2014)
Little Chance to Advance? An Enquiry into the Presence of Women at Art Academies in Poland (Kataryna Kozyra Foundation (2015)
or Micol Hebron’s Call for Gender Equity in the Arts project (2013-present)
There are no surveys which have looked at this question on a world scale. Most of the studies undertaken have been national. see for example, this report by the International Foundation for Women Artists – an IFWA blog post summarising research on women artists in Korea from 2007 and 2010. Either surveys have drawn on national census material or local feminist activists have counted themselves. Comparative analysis across continents or countries has been very rare.
In Europe, one large study undertaken in 2001, was unable to make more than tentative assumptions because governments and art institutions did not collect adequate data on questions of gender in many countries, only 10 countries were actually surveyed.
Several recent studies have used analysis of data based on resources available through Artnet, an auction/exhibition site. This report in Science (16 Nov 2018: Vol. 362, Issue 6416, pp. 825-829) looks at success in art in relation to gender and career trajectories in auction houses and exhibitions. This 2017 report on the Social Science Research Network, analyses Market Bias determined by gender among Yale School of Art graduates in the USA.
Vertical and Horizontal Segregation Patterns
In Pyramid or Pillars (ARCult, 2001) the authors found that the careers of women artists in Germany were marked in numerical terms by an inverted hierarchy of success. More women were engaged at the lowest levels of professional achievement. Few at the top.
This model corresponds with the pattern of distribution widely recognised for women in other male-dominated professions (medicine, banking, work in local/national politics) where women cluster at the bottom and form a minority at the top. This phenomena is known as “vertical segregation” within a profession.
Curating is another example of this phenomenon in a female-dominated profession because women form the majority of curators around the world and many women curators lead or have founded alternative and experimental art organisations, but they are currently the minority of museum directors of major national institutions (around 20% in most developed countries).
See this 2014 report on The Gender Gap in Art Museums by the Association of Art Museum Directors. It is still possible to become the “first” woman director of an art museum, as Penelope Curtis did at Tate Britain (2010-2015), before moving to the Calouste Gulbenkian or Frances Morris Director of Tate Modern from 2016, because there never were women who had held these roles before. See Victoria Turner’s 2002 research paper on this subject: 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 (2002) pp.6–10
Vertical segregation can be contrasted with horizontal segregation which is a measure of how different parts of a profession include or exclude women: i.e. more women lawyers working in family law and small firms rather than corporate law and major corporate law firms; or more women as general practitioners than brain surgeons; or more women textile artists than working with metal sculpture. Almost no statistical measurement of horizontal segregation in the visual arts in any one country or year has been conducted according to gender: in spite of the intense speculation about it in anecdotal evidence in art criticism and in gender-role stereotypes about the practices of women artists. Some of these assumptions about women artists revolve around discussion of their investment in higher numbers in different craft techniques, for example, embroidery or textiles/fiber art or book arts. Statistical evidence is rarely used to support many of the examples given in art criticism: the arguments instead are generally built on speculation and gendered assumptions or historical prejudices about the “appropriate” gender for a producer of the work.
n.paradoxa statistics page
n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal has a Statistics page which lists a range of statistical surveys reviewing the position of women artists.
Read Ann Kalmbach’s MFA thesis from 1974 on ‘The position of women artists within the aesthetic community’ where she gathers together statistics from a wide range of feminist surveys of the early 1970s. This document can be opened as a PDF, after downloading.
Read this article in ArtNews (June 2015)
Maura Reilly Taking the Measure of Sexism: Facts, Figures, and Fixes
Or this one in CanadianArt about Canada’s Galleries by Alison Cooley, Amy Luo and Caoimhe Morgan-Feir Canada’s Galleries Fall Short: The Not-So Great White North (21 April 2015)
Or this one by Beatriz Lozano (19 September 2019) ‘Visualizing the Numbers: See Infographics Tracing the Representation of Women Artists in Museums and the Market’ on Artnet.
FRESH TALK: Righting the Balance—The Artist’s Voice
National Museum of Women in Arts, Washington, Published on 3 Dec 2015,
Artists: Ghada Amer, Micol Hebron, Simone Leigh and Guerrilla Girl Alma Thomas discuss how parity issues impact or inspire their work and careers.
Women Artists: Representation, Recognition and Promotion
This lecture (5 Aug 2015) and moderated discussion explores the evolution of women artists over recent decades and their contributions to social change. The featured speaker is Susan Fisher Sterling, Director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, who is introduced by Elizabeth A. Sackler, Chair of the Brooklyn Museum Board.
A panel discussion moderated by Kymberly Pinder, Dean of the College of Fine Arts, University of New Mexico follows with Susan Fisher Sterling and artists Harmony Hammond, Rose B. Simpson, and Meridel Rubenstein.
Presented by the Women’s International Study Center with the support of the New Mexico Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
