Notes & Tidbits

Gender Equality - Not In Chelsea!

In a study of the language in more than 3,400 gallery press releases from 2006 and 2007, chelseaartgalleries.com found that women still are significantly underrepresented, and it appears to be getting worse.

In the press releases sent out by Chelsea galleries in 2006, the words "his" and "he" were 48% more common than "her" and "she". The following year, 2007, the gap had grown to 64%. The same trend holds for the more specific word combination "his/her work". In 2006 "his work" beat "her work" with 38%, in 2007 the difference was 56%.

Does 2008 promise to be better? With only 282 press releases to analyze, it's still too early to tell, but it doesn't look like an improvement - currently the gap between his/him and her/she is 78%.

But is this a historic difference that has been eliminated among younger artists? To test this hypothesis, we separated out the galleries that go to Art Basel and Miami Art Basel (more established galleries that usually represent an older generation of artists). We looked at some 1,000 press releases, and the gender gap is significantly larger for these galleries. In 2006, it was 93%, and in 2007 it was 152% (e.g. he/his was mentioned 2.5 times as often as she/her). The difference for the galleries that don't go to the Art Basel fairs (and usually represent younger artists), is still there, but smaller: In 2006 it was 33% and in 2007 it was 41%.

Source Data

Words counts (top 30 results)

Word combinations with two adjacent words (top 30 results)