Email
An audit of more than 100 commercial galleries in London has found that only 5% represent an equal number of male and female artists.
East London Fawcett's (ELF) art audit also found that not a single woman appeared on the top 100 auction performances list in 2012. The audit which looked at works from April 2012 – April 2013 gathered data on 134 commercial galleries in London, which collectively represent 3,163 artists.
Of this total, just 31% of the represented artists were women, with 78% of the galleries representing more men than women. Kira Cochrane writes today:
Here's a teaser. How many women artists featured in the top 100 auction sales, ranked by price, last year? Gemma Rolls-Bentley, an independent curator, decided to find out.
One day, not long ago, she sat down with the 2012 list, "and spent a couple of hours writing M next to the artists. I got to the end and there wasn't a single F." Some of those artists were alive, some were dead, all were highly valued - clearly considered "great" or "genius" - and all were men.
ELF, the East London branch of the Fawcett Society, also turned their attention to gender representation in solo shows featured in the exhibition programmes of 29 non-commercial galleries in London. Nearly a third of the galleries presented no female solo shows during this period and only one of the gallery programmes featured all female shows.
Public art also came under scrutiny from the ELF audit. Of the 386 public works of art that were recorded in Westminster and the City of London, a mere 8% were created by female artists. That may not come as much of of a surprise if you take into account that a large proportion of the pieces of art date back many years.
So if we look at the modern day, do female artists fare better? A quarter of the artists selected for the Fourth Plinth, situated in the northwest corner of Trafalgar Square, were female, as Kira Cochrane writes today "far from brilliant, but much better than those other statistics for public art".
Frieze Art Fair, an annual showcase of leading international artists, provided some interesting results. 27.5% of the artists represented at the art fair in 2012 were women. The results are a reflection of a survey that took in 3,441 artists across 135 international galleries that were represented in the commercial section of Frieze Art Fair 2012.
However, 23.3% of solo exhibitions hosted by commercial galleries in the capital during Frieze week presented female artists – an increase on the 11.6% figure that Laura McLean- Ferris found in 2008 when she conducted a similar survey.
Gemma Rolls-Bentley, arts director at ELF, is optimistic despite the gender gap displayed by the results:
The ELF art audit results provide statistical evidence that gender inequality still persists in London's art world. However, these results also demonstrate that significant positive progress has and is being made.By raising awareness of the challenges specific to female artists, we hope that the campaign will widen the dialogue around this issue and that as a result the gender balance will continue to improve. The art audit's message is one of optimism.
Campaign group, UK Feminista, published results in 2010 of a similar piece of research looking at gender inequalty in the art world. They found that 83% of the artists in the Tate Modern and 70% of the artists in the Saatchi Gallery were male.
But the gender gap is the reverse when you look at university stats. In her Datablog piece examining the gender gap at universities by institution and subject, Rebecca Ratcliffe found that 61.7% of the undergraduate creative arts and design intake in UK universities in 2011-12 was female. So why are so few female artists being represented in art galleries? We'd love to hear your views in the comments below.
Download the data
• DATA: download the full spreadsheet
More data
More data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian
;