Inside the Networks Driving the Artworld's Gender Gap

For decades, the art world has wrestled with gender inequality, and in recent years, the issue has received renewed attention through reports, exhibitions and books. 

In 2023, Tate Modern staged Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990, while, opening 4 September 2026, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), New York is showing Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives, a photography exhibition about intersectional feminist perspectives.

Notable reports include Hardwiring Change: Buying Back Time, published by the Association of Women in the Arts, and the Burns Halperin Report, co-authored by  noted art market journalists Julia Halperin and Charlotte Burns. Books include Katie Hessel’s bestselling The Story of Art Without Men (2022), which challenges traditional art historical narratives by highlighting the many women artists whose work has been sidelined, which was followed soon after by Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (2023) by Lauren Elkin.

Much of the discourse has focused on representation: who is exhibited in museums, signed up by galleries and sold at auction. But a new study published in Nature Communications approaches the issue from a different perspective.

The study is co-authored by academics Xindi Wang alongside Alexander J. Gates, a network scientist; Magnus Resch, an art-market economist; and Albert-László Barabási, one of the world's leading researchers in network science. But rather than simply crunching the numbers, the researchers examined how institutional networks influence artistic careers and help sustain unequal outcomes.

Gender Makeup

Resch, the art market economist, tells The Art Journal: “The most surprising finding wasn't that women are underrepresented in the art market – we already knew that. It's that an artist's own gender turned out to be a weaker predictor of reaching the auction market than the gender makeup of the institutions that show their work.”

The study analyses the exhibition histories of 65,768 contemporary artists across 20,389 museums, galleries and other art institutions worldwide, before combining that information with auction records. Its central argument is not that gender is irrelevant to artistic success but that gender inequality is embedded within broader institutional structures that influence which artists gain visibility, recognition and market access.

“Two artists with identical careers can end up on completely different trajectories depending purely on which network of galleries and museums exhibited them early on,” Resch says. “That reframes the problem: it's not only about individual bias, it's about who gets access to the relationships and institutions where careers are actually built.”

Reaching the Auction Block

The researchers began by documenting the continuing imbalance in contemporary art. Within their dataset, women artists represent 36.54 percent of active contemporary artists, compared with 63.46 percent men. Exhibition opportunities show a similar disparity, with men artists receiving significantly more exhibitions than women artists relative to their representation in the artist population. The gap becomes even wider in the secondary market. Women artists were less likely to reach the auction block, while works by male artists accounted for a substantially larger share of auction activity and sales value.

To examine how institutions contribute to these patterns, the researchers distinguished between two forms of gender equity – gender neutrality and gender balance. The former refers to whether institutions provide exhibition opportunities proportionate to the existing gender composition of the artist population. By contrast, gender balance refers to the goal of equal representation between male and female artists.

These distinctions highlight different challenges. For example, an institution can be gender-neutral while still exhibiting more men than women because the overall artist population remains unequal. Achieving gender balance requires institutions to move beyond reflecting existing demographics and actively address historical disparities, the report suggests.

Historical Disparities

The study found that 57.8 percent of institutions in the dataset meet the researchers’ criteria for gender neutrality, while only 24.46 percent meet the criteria for gender balance. Under the gender-balanced measure, approximately 72% of institutions were classified as overrepresenting men, showing that parity remains distant across much of the contemporary art system.

One of the study’s most significant findings concerns institutional prestige. Higher-prestige institutions were more likely to exhibit patterns of male overrepresentation. Among the most prestigious institutions in the dataset, around 80 percent were classified as male-overrepresented under the gender-balance criteria. Because these institutions often shape reputations, collections, and market attention, unequal representation at this level may have consequences beyond individual exhibitions.

“The higher you go, the fewer women you see,” Resch wrote in a recent LinkedIn post discussing the findings. He argues that influential museums and galleries play a particularly important role because they create the professional networks through which artists gain recognition.

So how does Resch suggest the art world should fix the problem? He argues that there should be more focus on the networks that create opportunity. 

Diversifying Networks

“The most prestigious museums like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim New York or Whitney Museum of American Art and galleries need to continue to diversify not only whom they exhibit, but also the professional networks they create,” he says. “Collectors should look beyond the same institutional circles that have historically produced market stars. And artists should understand that the networks they enter early in their careers may shape everything that follows.”

He adds that “the art world likes to believe that success is about talent. I disagree. Institutional networks are the strongest predictor of long-term success, not your art. If we want a fairer art world, changing who gets bought isn't enough. We also need to change who gets access to the networks where success is created.”

The study introduces the concept of “co-exhibition gender” to explore the relationship between artists and institutions. Rather than examining only an artist’s own gender, the researchers analysed the gender composition of the institutions where an artist has exhibited. An artist whose career is primarily connected to institutions that over-represent men is classified as having a “co-exhibition man” profile, while an artist associated with institutions that overrepresent women receives a “co-exhibition woman” classification.

Logic Regression Models

The results suggest that these institutional environments are strongly associated with later market outcomes. Using logistic regression models, the researchers found that co-exhibition gender has a stronger statistical relationship with auction access than artist gender alone. While women artists had lower odds of entering the auction market than men, artists associated with institutions that over-represent women had an even lower probability of auction access compared with artists associated with male-overrepresented institutions.

Museums, galleries, curators, collectors, and other cultural institutions do not simply display artists after success has already been achieved, the report argues, they help shape the processes through which reputations are built. Early institutional recognition can lead to further exhibitions, greater visibility, and increased market interest.

However, the study does not show that institutional networks replace gender as an explanation for inequality. Instead, it suggests that gender disparities may be reinforced through institutional pathways. Networks themselves are shaped by historical patterns, existing reputations, collecting practices, and decisions made by cultural organisations.

The researchers acknowledge that their data cannot identify the specific mechanisms behind these inequalities, including whether they result from explicit discrimination, implicit bias, market preferences, or accumulated historical advantage.

Changing Access

The authors also note several imitations. The study relies on binary gender classification because large-scale data on gender identities beyond men and women is not currently available at this scale. Exhibition records are more complete for prominent institutions, potentially limiting representation of smaller organisations and less documented regions. Additionally, auction success represents only one form of recognition and does not capture the full range of artistic achievement.

Nevertheless, the study contributes an important perspective to ongoing discussions about equality in the art world. It suggests that increasing the number of women artists represented in exhibitions and collections is necessary but may not be sufficient. Because institutional relationships help determine which artists gain access to future opportunities, addressing inequality may require attention to the structures through which artistic reputations are built.

“Changing who gets bought isn't enough,” Resch says. “We need to change who gets access to the networks where success is created.”