Qualities with Inequalities: How Gender Influences Value in the Market for Contemporary Art
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2 Dec 2020
16:00-17:30, Online
- Sociology Seminar Add to Calendar
Duke University
Abstract:Â Women now comprise the majority of graduates with Fine Arts degrees, yet they represent less than fifteen percent of art displayed in prominent Modern and contemporary museums. In art galleries, living female artists are outnumbered by their male counterparts two-to-one. I leverage this case of gender inequality to investigate the stratifying effect of social characteristics in markets for cultural goods. With a dataset of 259,600 recent artworks by 18,806 artists gleaned from an online marketplace, I first implement machine learning to examine the possibility that female and male artists produce art with different characteristics. That is, that they supply the market with different goods. This test is possible because each artwork has been coded by a team of art historians using a taxonomy of over 1,000 art-relevant features related to disciplines, physical attributes, styles and periods, object types, and settings. With confidence, I find that women and men do not make substantially different art, though they do vary statistically in their use of certain characteristics. I then move to explore alternative hypotheses for inequality. Using mixed-effect regression with covariate balancing propensity scores, I find that gender is a strong and significant predictor for the economic value of art, even when comparing women and men who make similar work. Moreover, I find that the artistic features most associated with women are valued less than those most associated with men. This suggests a double path toward market disparity, whereby both the labors and the aesthetics of female artists are devalued. I end by discussing the relevance of this finding for efforts toward narrowing the gender gap among creative professionals.
The Sociology Seminar Series for Trinity Term is convened by Christopher Barrie, Fangqi Wen and Tobias Ruttenauer. For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.