3 | Artist Representation and Gender Issues
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Figure 3.15 | Share of Female Versus Male Artists’ Works (Created After 1999) Female
Male
100% 80% 63%
64%
64%
37%
36%
36%
North America
Africa & Middle East
Oceania
60%
72%
72%
74%
28%
28%
26%
Europe
Asia
Latin America
40% 20% 0%
Š Arts Economics (2019) with data from Taylor Whitten Brown / Artsy
Is There Gender Inequality in Primary Online Art Markets? To demonstrate an initial investigation of gender inequality with Artsy data, research was carried out on a sample of 108,654 artworks that have been produced since 1999 by a set of 11,675 individual artists associated with 2,069 galleries. These artworks have been coded by the taxonomy of The Art Genome Project, with an average of 24 artistic features applied to each, on a scale from 0 to 100, depending on how well the feature is represented in the work.40
To enter this sample, it was also required that the artwork have a listing price on Artsy.41 The median number of artworks by an artist in the sample was 16, with a small difference of 16 for women and 17 for men. Approximately 35% of the artists in this sample were female, and they produced approximately 35% of the artwork. This statistic varied somewhat across geographic regions, according to the location of associated galleries.
40 This sample does not include design objects or artworks that are primarily classified as performance, digital, or video art. 41 This is important to note because it limits the generalizability of findings to the degree that artworks with a listing price on Artsy differ from artworks without a listing price.