Quantifying institutional gender inequality in contemporary visual art

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.