Let’s look at the larger picture of work for women….!
Current statistics do not adequately reveal the extent of the changes in women artists’ visibility or presence in the last forty-fifty years, they only indicate the scale of activity. They do not tell us about the quality of women’s work in terms of economic or cultural value, nor do they tell us anything about the type of art produced by women.
While there have been changes, the shifts in the position or numbers of women artists do not represent a simple model of linear progress upwards. They are highly varied dependent on which country you look at and what sector of the “art world” you survey.
The other key question to consider is whether women’s participation within the arts is broadly in line with other patterns of women’s employment and participation in the labour market. This is dependent on how you classify “being an artist” – Is it a freelance position? Is it a profession? Is it a manual trade, conducted from a workshop/studio?
Current statistics about women artists should to be compared to the position of all working women in any country in order to make sense of what opportunities or discrimination women artists face as a working professionals. They also need to be compared to the many other professions/ trades / jobs women occupy.
Women represent 52% of the world population.
The percentage of women regarded as working amongst the adult population varies from as low as 10% in some Middle Eastern countries to as high as 80% in some countries in Asia. In Europe and America, the figures vary between 40%-60%, dependent on age, marital status, and the number of dependents (children and others adults needing care) they have. These definitions are based on paid employment in a waged labour market – not labour, as activities performed to maintain or reproduce life.
Rarely is the profession of being an artist compared with that of being a doctor, politician, lawyer, boardroom director (male-dominated professions) or being a nurse, primary school teacher, waitress or retail shop assistant (female-dominated professions).
Women artists are, however, regularly contrasted with being a housewife, being a mother, or being an amateur (as opposed to a professional artist).
These three roles in which women form the majority of participants, and, in many people’s view, are regarded as “female-defined”, fall outside any scheme of paid employment.
As a result of this negative comparison with these areas of women’s labour, women’s roles as artists are often negatively defined as outside “waged labour”. None of the censuses or surveys above which measure “waged labour” and “income” have made this false comparison but it is often repeated in art criticism and art history. This is an ideological assumption about “normal” roles for women, it is not a definition of being a woman artist. This implication of “being an artist” as outside “waged labour” markets is where the negative association between amateurism and women artists are linked.
This is why many professional artists since the 1960s when speaking publically about their position, have chosen to distance themselves from being known or identified solely as “women”. They distance themselves from the term “woman artist” because of these negative associations with amateurism, unpaid labour and “hobbyism”.
For other women, whose activities have been invested in the women’s art movement since the 1970s, defining yourself as a “woman artist” has been a mark of identification with feminism’s attempt to re-evaluate the contribution of women as artists. These professional women artists reject any automatic association of woman with “amateur” and someone who is not paid for their work or labour and proudly identify themselves as “women artists” – artists who are also women and whose contribution to the arts is as a woman.
What is the model of being an artist today?
Most professional artists are freelance, self-employed working professionals. They run their own studios as small businesses. They employ or work with other people to produce their work. Their work involves developing relationships with other artists, critics and journalists, curators, museum professionals, dealers and collectors and publishers. They are involved in marketing and promoting themselves and their own work. A small proportion of these artists teach in art schools. Many are involved in artistic groups, circles or art associations. They give talks about their work and take part in symposia or panel discussions. Their practice often includes writing about their work or ideas (or at least documenting it) as well as making art. They seek to develop their practice through commissions, through artists’ residency programmes, through collaborations with different communities on projects. Through all these means, they seek opportunities to produce, exhibit and sell or promote their work to different publics.
I will define a feminist here as a woman who is willing to work with other women to reduce inequality in the long run or to achieve a specific short-term reform. Without the aspect of collaboration, whether it is to found a co-operative gallery, infiltrate an art school, or expose the prejudices of art dealers, a woman artist is not a feminist. Individual stands and victories are an important part of the general despecialization of the sexes but are not explicitly political in function. To claim your own life or some aspect of it for art can certainly be part of the presentation of women’s lives as subject matter, but it is an individual, not a shared enterprise.
Lawrence Alloway ‘ Women’s Art in the ‘70s’ Art in America (May-June 1976)
How does the position of being a woman artist compare with other creative, often free-lance or entrepreneurial, positions for women in the arts: being a woman composer, a film director, a photographer, a journalist, a novelist, a designer? In all these professions, women are “minoritised” i.e. regarded in terms of critical content and value as a minority within the profession. This “minoritisation” contributes to the idea that women are rarely seen at its centre of their profession: i.e. leading the direction of the profession and art form. This happens in spite of the fact that in each discipline or area many individual women are celebrated as “exceptional” and talented and unique in their contribution to the field as a whole. The numbers of women in a profession can provide evidence that the marginalisation of women artists exists but it is not an explanation of why this marginalisation occurs or if discrimination is present.
In all the professions, there is a hierarchy of positions from trainee/apprentice/”young” to “mature”/expert/master/senior practitioners. This hierarchy is built upon the different levels of experience and the marks of recognition people attain as their careers progress in terms of awards, the roles they occupy in institutions for the arts and the level of activities with which they are engaged. Recognition is usually awarded by other senior figures within the profession itself. Women artists could not progress their careers if they did not receive the support of men who are the majority of “senior” figures in most professions. Men, in this sense, occupy a “gate-keeping” role, admitting or not younger artists and different groups of artists into their ranks: increasingly, women are occupying “gate-keeping” roles in our society.
In today’s media-saturated culture, the celebration of new and “young” goes hand in hand with the recognition of much more senior artists. Some people believe, as a result, that these distinctions have melted away, but sustaining a career in the arts relies on the accumulation of these forms of recognition over a long period. Typically, in the profile of artists, you can see that younger artists generally have fewer one-person shows and are involved in a greater number of small group exhibitions compared with older artists whose works are more frequently shown in retrospective exhibitions and are included in more art historical exhibitions about movements or tendencies and/or museum collection displays.
Equal Opportunities, Mainstreaming or Equal Pay for Equal Work
In the late 1970s, the position of women relative to men in the labour market was measured and assessed many times in many different industries in relation to a key feminist political claim that women should receive “equal pay for equal work”.
The attempt to tackle the vertical segregation of women in the labour market led to the introduction of “equal opportunities” policies in education, training and job interviews and quota systems as goals for government and corporations in recruitment and anti-discriminatory legislation in many countries. This was not only a response to feminist arguments but also a response by employers to the waste of talent and expertise in many industries (at a time of labour expansion) which filtered out women from their recruitment systems at higher levels.
In the 1990s, the approach to “equal opportunities” which had emphasised training, especially assertiveness training, was modified in Europe into “gender-mainstreaming”. Gender-mainstreaming necessitated the collation of data about gender, a counting of the proportion of male/female and ethnic/sexual minorities staff in government and public organisations. This monitoring approach was a bureaucratic measure – and as the statistics above show is rarely thorough. This “monitoring” replaced much of the actual action to transform the situation which had been behind equal opportunities when it was first introduced. Instead an emphasis was placed on mentoring women into leadership positions: the focus shifted to producing women as senior managers, in leadership and as entrepreneurs. For many this is “neo-liberalism” in action as it leaves the market to decide who is the best candidate for any position.
There are plenty of campaigns by artists to improve the position of artists vis-a-vis the state funded sector and campaigns for resale rights or exhibition fees from not-for-profit or publically-funded organisations. See Working Artists and the Greater Economy (WAGE)’s 2008 Survey of the position on the waged labour of art workers and non-profit arts organisations (New York). If you want to know more about this: read Hans Abbing’s book Why are Artists Poor?
If women artists are entrepreneurs and businesswomen or self-employed, will this market-orientated approach determine their future in the labour market?
An example of this shift can be seen in the campaign group 30% club http://30percentclub.org/ which aims to promote women’s representation in the top 100 FTSE companies boards to 30%. Their arguments rely on the waste of talent, and the idea that women entering senior management will create a trickle-down effect for other women to be noticed and gain recognition. Read the Davies Report analysis of the last 5 years. http://thedaviesreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Davies-Review-Five-year-Summary-October-2015.pdf or Barclay’s banks report on Stereotypes about Female Entrepreneurs http://30percentclub.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Updated-CFE-Barclays-Shattering-Stereotypes-Report-WEB.pdf
Many arguments have been raised for and against equal opportunities and quota systems as mechanisms to transform the job market and the proportion of women and ethnic minorities in the labour force. Those against equal opportunities argued that better qualified candidates (i.e. white and male) would be eliminated from recruitment processes and less qualified candidates appointed because of the colour of their skin or gender. Other feminist criticisms included the idea that equal opportunities produces “tokenism” which is an inadequate response to change: ie the elevation of a single individual which masks the lack of change in the system as a whole between men and women. For example, will the position for women artists in the museum change, if a female director is appointed to a museum?
There is still present in most systems and markets a considerable difference in the pay between men and women. In the UK, this gender gap is 23%. In the arts surveys in Canada, Australia and the USA, have found the pay gap to have varied amongst artists because of gender, with women earning 50-87 c for each $1 dollar earned. In the arts, the price of women artist’s work in the auction houses is still considerably less than the price of men’s work. Women artists form a minority of the artists named by KunstKompass survey of the top 100 artists in the world. In 2020, Rosemarie Trockel, Cindy Sherman and Pipilotti Rist were named in the top 10 of artists. These figures are based on a calculation of influence generated by the number of one-person shows in contemporary art galleries, the artist’s participation in group exhibitions and biennales, the visibility of an artist in the press and the number of publications produced on them and prizes awarded to them. Women artists were present at less than 10% of the top 100 for many years, but now represent 22% (2015). KunstKompass has been criticised for its Western and EuroCentric bias in its surveys and criteria, but its survey underlines the disproportionate and asymmetrical presence of women artists in the art world by these measures of success. The fundamental feminist demand for “equal pay for equal work” has not yet been achieved in the rest of society and the proportion of men and women in many trades and professions remains asymmetrical. An equality in numbers at the level of representation might prove to be a poor replacement for the more basic feminist ambition of “equal pay for equal work”.
What does this kind of Count mean?
This kind of head count is not a projection of the future status of women, only an indication of where and how women artists have appeared in whatever was measured.
Statistics are not the representation of a “correct”, “normal” or “natural” level for the visibility of women – they are the product of a process undertaken to gather the statistics and may be flawed or inaccurate, but they are always retrospective – a view of what has been. They do not represent a “glass ceiling” i.e. the level beyond which women do not rise in a profession or industry.
Will counting heads produce change?
Does consistent monitoring of the number of women vs. the number of men provide an adequate indication of how discrimination against women is operating? This is what the policy of “gender mainstreaming” aimed to achieve: a kind of naming and shaming.
If the counting stops will the gender gap in pay stop and inequality disappear?
‘Women in the Arts’
Talk in Berlin: Siri Hustvedt, Katharina Grosse in the context of the exhibition “Queensize – Female Artists from the Olbricht Collection at me Collectors Room Berlin, moderated by Nicola Graef.
What roles do women have in the art world? How are they perceived and how do they perceive themselves? Do women take an active role in getting their work and their persona recognized or are they still underdogs in a man-dominated art world? Are there typical ‘feminine’ topics that female artists touch upon in their work? Can we even still talk about the idea of a feminine discourse today?
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The myth of the Glass Ceiling
The glass ceiling was a phrase coined in the press to explain why women could not advance in business and management and why there seemed to be invisible barriers which could not be explained in terms of the labour market or “rational” explanation. (It is often attributed to a 1986 Wall Street Journal report on corporate women Hymowitz, C., & Schellhardt, T. D. (1986, March 24). The glass ceiling. The Wall Street Journal. Special Report on the Corporate Woman).
The phenomena described within “the glass ceiling” have now become synonymous with all discussion of gender discrimination in the workplace – and this description of the problems of women in management, business and the professions has a long history since the nineteenth century (especially in medicine). Discrimination and sexism, not the “glass ceiling”, was central to discussion of women in the professions in the 1920s and 1930s and it has been the subject of many research projects on women-in-business since the 1950s.
There is very little “new” in the analysis about how sex discrimination works. The factors preventing women’s progression – in the corporate world – are well-known and include:
a) men’s use of an old boys’ network to promote those sharing the same education and values;
b) failure to enforce anti-sex discrimination laws or affirmative action;
c) pervasive sexual harassment;
and
d) a generally low evaluation of women’s abilities by managers and “gate-keepers”.
The glass ceiling has become an alibi for not putting any institutional measures in place to counter discrimination, as the factors controlling the effect are believed to be “invisible” and “hard-to-break” attitudes of men against women’s progression or career development.
See this 2004 report on The Glass Ceiling
or
this more academic review of the literature on the Glass Ceiling which has proliferated.
Here are some sites which attempt to turn the tables on this inaccurate phrase, by promoting women at work or exploring their attitudes to explanations about structures or merit:
http://www.glassceiling.com/research/
or this article ‘Seeing through the glass ceiling’ which asks if women favor structural or meritocratic explanations for how they reach corporate success?
Summary
We have statistics available to us which are partial and incomplete but clearly describe that different kinds of discrimination are present.
We have recognised problems in how women achieve success in all workplaces.
We have different explanations about the structural conditions under which women artists work: in terms of vertical and horizontal segregation of professions.
We have different explanations about women’s achievement in terms of merit and talent.
And we have a mythology about the “glass ceiling” resting in largely ill-conceived or stereotyped attitudes men hold about women or employers hold about employees and fostered by the promotion systems used in today’s old boys’ (or male-dominated) professional networks. The “glass ceiling” is a myth used to support laisse faire free market solutions where talent is supposed to rise – without question.
These problems regarding women’s waged work in many fields also apply to women artists working today in the art world.
