Wednesday, July 29, 2026

Gender equity: What keeps women artists out of the art world’s top echelon? Man-overrepresented institutions. Really!

Why are women underrepresented in e.g. construction or mining professions? What about gender equity in construction or mining?

A nice case again of cherry picking (or demagoguery)!

If I were a construction worker myself I would like to have more female colleagues and less male buddies! 😊

Men watch out in the age of gender equality and gender equity!

The author of the article below is a male. Is he pandering to women or spreading the predilections and ideological preferences/biases of an elite US university? Is his and his collaborators study junk science? You bet!

Pardon my following two facetious, possibly sexist, or misogynistic sounding remarks:
  • Maybe they are not as pretty as Mistress Kamala, who early on in her political career had an affair with a powerful politician in San Francisco.
  • Or some prefer to be and remain muses rather than artists?
"Women remain underrepresented [???] at the highest levels of the art world. In a new study, Yale SOM’s Magnus Resch examined the institutional pathways that shape artistic success — and how they may perpetuate gender gaps. "

"A painting by Joan Mitchell recently set a record for the highest sale price for a single work by a woman artist in Asia. Can you put that news in the context of the market for women’s art more generally?

Joan Mitchell’s $17.6 million sale is an important moment, but it doesn’t change the overall structure of the market. The gap at the very top remains enormous: the highest prices for male artists are still multiple times higher than those achieved by women. ...

To understand why, it helps to briefly explain how careers in the art world are built. Unlike many markets, success is not determined in a single step. It is the result of a sequence of institutional validations. In a previous paper I published in Science, we showed that roughly 99% of institutions have little to no impact on an artist’s long-term success.
Instead, there is a very small circle of highly influential institutions—household names like the Guggenheim Museum or the Gagosian gallery—that disproportionately shape careers. If an artist does not enter this network early on, the probability of reaching the top of the market drops significantly. ..."

From the abstract:
"From disparities [???] in the number of exhibiting artists to auction opportunities, there is evidence of women’s under-representation in visual art.
Here we explore the exhibition history and auction sales of 65,768 contemporary artists in 20,389 institutions, revealing gender differences in the artist population, exhibitions and auctions.
We distinguish between two criteria for gender equity [???]: gender-neutrality, when artists have gender-independent access to exhibition opportunities, and gender-balanced, that strives for gender parity in representation, finding that 58% of institutions are gender-neutral but only 24% are gender-balanced, and that the fraction of man-overrepresented institutions [???] increases with institutional prestige. 
We define artist’s co-exhibition gender to capture the gender inequality of the institutions that an artist exhibits.
Finally, we use logistic regression to predict an artist’s access to the auction market, finding that co-exhibition gender has a stronger correlation with success than the artist’s gender. These results help unveil and quantify the institutional forces that relate to the persistent gender imbalance in the art world."

Yale Today




Fig. 1: Gender bias in art.


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