Women artists: gender, ethnicity, origin and contemporary prices

Women account for slightly more than half of persons who identify some version of visual artist as their occupation in the USA, and account for slightly less than half of the recipients of MFA degrees. Despite this, works by female artists constitute approximately 7% of the works offered for sale at global auction houses. The works sell for substantially lower prices, with unadjusted discounts in mean price generally in excess of 40%. In this paper, we explore this problem in detail, examining how much of the gender price gap remains after adjusting for characteristics of the artworks, conditions of sale and image content and complexity. We explore how the gender gap is influenced by artist ethnicity and region of birth, and document what appear to be important distinctions and changes over the past 25–30 years. We consider a variety of possible explanations including whether works by women artists are substantially different in characteristics or content than works by other artists, whether they are avoided by the premier auction houses and whether they tend to fail to sell at auction more frequently. This allows us to reduce the range of possible explanations for why these differences continue to be observed, and provide directions for future research.