Methodology: How We Gathered and Analyzed Our Data on Women in the Art World

We teamed up with In Other Words to examine
how the representation of female artists in museums and the market
has evolved over the past decade. Below is a detailed breakdown of
our approach.

We gathered and examined data
from 26 museums across the United States for the ten-year period
between January 1, 2008 and December 31, 2018. We looked at the
total number of works that entered the museums’ permanent
collections and, within that, the total number of works by female
artists (we included both purchases and donations of art but
excluded promised gifts). We also counted solo exhibitions
dedicated to the work of female artists and thematic group
exhibitions featuring mostly work by female artists (51 percent or
more).

We have a decade’s worth of
acquisition and exhibition data for 25 museums, and seven years’
worth for one (the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in
Bentonville, Arkansas, which opened in 2011).

We defined female as any artist
who identifies herself as a woman. Artists who are nonbinary and do
not self-identify as female were not included. We counted
collectives or companies whose founding members were majority
female as well as work designed by women but not necessarily
manufactured by them. Unnamed or unknown artists who the museums
believe are very likely to have been women were included in our
study.

The vast majority of the
information was provided by the institutions themselves and
verified by our research team. This means the data reflects each
museum’s distinct record-keeping practices. Some, for example,
record print or photography portfolios as one object, while others
count each individual page in the portfolio as a separate
acquisition. In select cases where museums were unable to provide a
full data set, we gathered the data manually (as was the case for
the Museum of Modern Art).

We deliberately sought a mix of
institutions in terms of their budget, focus, attendance, and
location. The museums we examined are, in alphabetical order: the
Baltimore Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the Cleveland Museum
of Art; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville,
Arkansas; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Dia Art Foundation, New
York; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the High Museum
of Art, Atlanta; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Washington, DC; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the
Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke
University, Durham, North Carolina; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of
Art, Kansas City; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
Philadelphia; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Seattle
Art Museum; the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC;
the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Virginia Museum of
Fine Arts in Richmond.

To better understand how these
works entered into museums’ collections, we also gathered data from
17 of the participating museums about what proportion were gifts
(53 percent) or purchases (21 percent). (The remainder was unknown,
either because the museums were unclear or did not provide the
data.)

To provide insight into the
private market, we calculated the proportion of female artists
represented at the Art Basel fairs in Basel, Hong Kong, and Miami,
checking lists of artists on the fair’s website (2015–18) against
our master list of more than 21,000 female artists’
names.

The museum data collection was
overseen by Charlotte Burns. The process was executed by Julia
Vennitti, and analysis performed by Maggie Jordan and Michael
Klein, with data entry assistance from Madeline Barnabee. Resales
were tracked and analyzed by Sotheby’s Mei Moses. Gallery data and
art fair statistics were gathered by Charlotte Burns and Julia
Vennitti.

The auction market data
collection was overseen by Julia Halperin and Michaela Ben Yehuda
and was provided by the artnet Price Database. It reflects auction
results from more than 400 auction houses worldwide between January
1, 2008 and June 1, 2019. All sales prices are adjusted to include
the buyer’s premium. Price data from previous years has not been
adjusted for inflation. All results are logged in the currency
native to the auction house where the sale took place, then
converted to US dollars based on the exchange rate on the day of
the sale.

Data visualizations were created
by Beatriz Lozano.

We gathered data across a
three-month period beginning in February 2019, and then spent four
months interviewing more than 40 people—a mix of museum directors
and curators, collectors, dealers, advisors, and academics—to
document their reactions, insights, and context.

For more from this project, see our examination of women in
museums; our examination of the women in
the market; four case studies on
museums making change; our investigation into
maternity leave in the art world; visualizations of our
findings; and art-world reactions to
the data.

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