In the Art World Gender Gap, Networks Matter More Than Representation

Over the past decade, the art world has begun to confront the gender inequality inherent in a system long dominated by an overwhelmingly male, often patriarchal, hierarchy that casts women primarily as muses, subjects and assistants. There has been notable progress: women artists are now better represented in galleries and museums and more are reaching the upper ranks of the auction market. According to the latest Art Basel and UBS report, women account for 45 percent of artists represented by dealers (compared to 35 percent in 2018). And among galleries working exclusively in the primary market, women made up 50 percent of represented artists in 2025, essentially achieving parity.

But their share of dealer sales by value has risen more slowly, from 28 percent in 2018 to 37 percent in 2025; at primary-market galleries, women generated 44 percent of sales by value in 2025. There is also a sharp divide by gallery size. In 2025, women represented 55 percent of artists at dealers with annual sales below $250,000 but only 35 percent at galleries with revenues above $10 million, and their share of sales shrank accordingly, from 43 percent at the smallest galleries to 27 percent at the largest. Clearly, women remain underrepresented at the high end of the commercial system.

This matters because the value of art is largely a social construction. A series of players helps shape, recognize and, above all, validate inherently symbolic values, which are then translated into an economic value once an artist’s work enters the market. Institutions do more than exhibit paintings and sculpture; they determine which artists gain visibility, which earn legitimacy and which rise to the top economically, just as brand-name galleries do their part to establish tiers and determine which audiences an artist will reach.

A 2026 study of gender inequality in the art market, published in Nature Communications and co-authored by art-market economist Magnus Resch, academic Xindi Wang, network scientist Alexander J. Gates and physicist Albert-László Barabási, examines the role networks play in an artist’s ascent, first within institutions and often later in the market, since institutional reputation shapes access to commercial representation, resources and rewards. These networks are clusters of museums and galleries that tend to collaborate and show similar artists, and some are more prestigious, more connected and more likely to lead to commercial success than others.

Looking at the careers of more than 65,000 artists across 20,000 museums and galleries worldwide, the study confirmed that an artist’s success is shaped less by individual talent or identity, than by where they exhibit and with whom they are shown. Of the artists sampled, 41,738 were men and 24,030 were women, a ratio of 1.74 to 1. Men were exhibited 662,571 times, compared with only 355,506 times for women—a ratio of 1.86.

Yet the key finding is not that women are penalized for being women in male-dominated networks, even as the study confirms that the most prestigious institutions are the most male-dominated. In fact, it confirmed that a woman and a man in the same male-dominated network performed almost identically. The real obstacle women face is gaining access to the networks that define value in the first place. According to the study, the disadvantage begins much earlier and there is very little mobility once an artist enters a particular network. That holds especially true for women who try to transition into male-dominated networks.

“When we built a statistical model to test what actually predicts whether an artist ever reaches the auction market, an artist’s own gender turned out to matter less than the gender makeup of the institutions that exhibited them early in their career,” Resch told Observer. “Two artists with identical résumés—same career length, same exhibition rate—can end up with very different odds of reaching auction, purely based on which network of galleries and museums showed their work first. Move a male into a female-dominated network, and his odds drop just as sharply.” Or to put it another way, inequality may not only be about who gets selected but also about which networks are doing the selecting and when.

The study also measured how often artists move from exhibitions to auction, in effect converting institutional reputation into market value. It found that 21.83 percent of exhibiting artists have at least one recorded auction sale, but the gap is wide: 24.39 percent of men made the transition, compared with only 15.65 percent of women. Auction frequency and prices also skew toward men. On average, male artists appear in 1.66 times as many auctions as female artists and command auction prices 1.75 times higher. Yet the study also found that the gender makeup of an artist’s co-exhibitors correlates more strongly with access to the secondary market than the artist’s own gender.

The analysis also suggested that early exhibitions matter disproportionately because movement across networks is rare and careers are set on a fixed path from the beginning. Male- and female-dominated institutions, the study found, barely connect with each other, with gaps widening over time until there is no longer one art world but two running in parallel, supporting different groups of artists and shaping entirely different narratives. According to the study, 58 percent of institutions are gender-neutral but only 24 percent are gender-balanced, and the share of institutions where men are overrepresented rises with prestige.

In Resch’s view, closing the gender gap in the art world will take more than meeting exhibition quotas, because any intervention must begin much earlier in an artist’s career. “It isn’t simply that individual women are judged more harshly once their work is seen—gender still plays a role there, our data shows, just a smaller one,” he explained. The bigger issue is structural. “The most prestigious institutions are also the most male-dominated (80 percent, versus 67 percent)… If we want a fairer art market, it isn’t enough to simply exhibit more women. We need to open up access to the networks and relationships where careers are actually built, especially at the top.”

The study echoes many of the broader challenges women face in advancing their careers that were explored in “Hardwiring Change: Buying Back Time,” a report by Artnet and the Association of Women in the Arts (AWITA). It found that one of the main drivers of gender imbalance in the art world is attrition: women working as artists or in any other role simply leave. Drawing on responses from 2,000 survey participants, the report found that nearly half of mid-career women, mostly Millennials and Gen Z, were considering exiting the art world within the next five years because they didn’t foresee being offered senior positions and there wouldn’t necessarily be meaningful financial rewards if they did rise in the ranks (particularly when compared with male peers or against opportunities in other industries). This, too, likely comes down to networks, whether for artists or curators, dealers, critics and other art-world professionals, in both commercial and institutional settings. Considered in that context, the report’s use of the word “hardwiring” seems relevant, as it suggests fixed, deeply embedded connections or, metaphorically, the near-automatic behaviors and relational dynamics built into the system.

The gender gap is not simply the result of individual institutions choosing more men than women; it has been hardwired into the networks through which artistic value, visibility and market success are produced. Consequently, success in art is not only cumulative but relational. An artist is introduced to a curator, who recommends her to a gallery, which places her work with an important collector, who may sit on a museum board, increasing the likelihood of an institutional acquisition or exhibition, which then strengthens prices and attracts further representation. (Note that the same dynamic can be applied to any role in the art world.) Once these relationships are established, they tend to perpetuate. But if the next network a woman artist needs to enter to advance is male-dominated or otherwise oriented toward men, there will be a gap in the accumulation of relational and symbolic capital—a factor that often weighs more heavily, and comes into play earlier, than either practiced skill or raw talent.

In the Hardwiring survey, around 76 percent of women ages 35-54 report having faced structural barriers related to gender, care responsibilities, race or class. Gender is by far the most commonly cited, named by 82.5 percent of those who encountered obstacles—more than double the rates for class (39.6 percent), care responsibilities (32.8 percent) and race (25.2 percent).

Working within male-dominated networks often means tolerating financial instability, administrative overload and structural inequities—the three main factors driving respondents to exit the art world. Women in full-time roles carry an especially heavy load, with 48 percent spending more than half their working time on administrative or logistical tasks. It is hard not to connect this, at least in part, to the way corporate workflows took shape in the postwar period. Women entered offices in significant numbers in that era but were concentrated in secretarial and clerical roles rather than positions of authority. Beneath that history lies an even more entrenched cultural script that often begins within the family: women as caretakers, organizers and facilitators, and men as leaders and decision-makers.

According to the survey, having women in senior leadership reduces, but does not eliminate, the likelihood of encountering structural barriers and inequality. In workplaces where women hold senior roles, the share of women reporting structural barriers drops to 33 percent, compared with 80 percent in organizations without women leaders. Female-led organizations can improve workplace conditions, but they cannot remedy deeper inequities, which are rooted in the broader networks in which those organizations operate.

“In a market that prides itself on originality and merit, the gap between perception and reality is particularly stark,” Resch said. Ultimately, true gender equity in the art world will only be achieved when equal representation—in gallery and museum exhibitions and at auction—is matched by equal mobility. Until networks open up, gender will keep filtering talent long before anyone has the chance to judge the work.

This article originally appeared in Observer’s newsletter about art market trends to watch.