Ann Marie Gan – Research

At small and midsize museums, with budgets under $15 million, women have essentially achieved parity

Reporter Hilarie M. Sheets with The New York Times has covered the research of Ann Marie Gan, an SMU student in the MA/MBA in Arts Management in the Cox School of Business and Meadows School of the Arts.

The article, Study Finds a Gender Gap at the Top Museums, published March 7.

Gan authored the study with Zannie Giraud Voss, director of the National Center for Arts Research, NCAR, at Southern Methodist University, and Christine Anagnos, executive director of the Association of Art Museum Directors, AAMD.

The research study was designed to understand the gender gap in art museum directorships and to explore potential factors to help AAMD member institutions advance toward greater gender equality.

Through a combination of quantitative analysis and interviews, the researchers examined the current and historical factors of the gender gap in art museum directorships.

The Association of Art Museum Directors represents 236 art museum directors in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. It promotes the vital role of art museums throughout North America and advances the profession by cultivating leadership and communicating standards of excellence in museum practice.

The Meadows School of the Arts is one of the foremost U.S. arts education institutions. It offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in advertising, art, art history, arts management and arts entrepreneurship, communication studies, creative computation, dance, film and media arts, journalism, music and theatre. It shares with the Cox School of Business at SMU the dual-degree MA/MBA in arts management. For more information, visit www.smu.edu/meadows.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Hilarie M. Sheets
The New York Times
Women run just a quarter of the biggest art museums in the United States and Canada, and they earn about a third less than their male counterparts, according to a report released on Friday by the Association of Art Museum Directors, a professional organization.

The group examined salary data on the 217 members it had last year through the prism of gender, for the first time. The report noted strides made by women at small and midsize museums, with budgets under $15 million, often university or contemporary-art institutions. Here, women have basically achieved parity, holding nearly half of the directorships and earning just about the same as men. But the gap is glaring at big institutions, those with budgets over $15 million: Only 24 percent are led by women, and they make 29 percent less than their male peers.

And just five of the 33 most prominent art museums — those with budgets greater than $20 million — have women at the helm.

“There is a difference if a woman is running one of these big museums,” said Elizabeth Easton, director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, a training program in New York that has helped place nine women in directorships, but none at the country’s most influential museums. “Those directors are the most loud and authoritative voices. It sets the tone.” ….

…. Written in partnership with the National Center for Arts Research, the report, called “The Gender Gap in Museum Directorships,” explores the factors contributing to the gulf at the top and frames the findings within the debate provoked by Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In” and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” in The Atlantic.

Combining large and small institutions, the report found that an average of 42 percent of the association’s museum directors were women. That is certainly a different picture from 25 years ago, when only 14 percent of museums in the association were run by women, and a slight improvement from 38 percent five years ago.

On average, however, women who run art institutions earned 21 percent less than their male counterparts in 2013 — a bigger difference than the 18 percent overall median pay split between the sexes reported by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The report, which incorporated observations from interviews with six executive search recruiters, considered reasons for the gap, including the ratio of men to women on museum boards, which hire directors. While the recruiters agreed that boards were no longer all-male clubs — women now outnumber men, 59 to 30, on the board of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, for instance — gender ratios remain uneven. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the male voting members still outnumber female ones, 23 to 10. At the National Gallery, the board has seven men and two women. ….

Read the full story.

Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

New study examines the current and historical factors of the gender gap in art museum directorships, particularly at large museums

The Association of Art Museum Directors, AAMD, and the National Center for Arts Research, NCAR, at Southern Methodist University have released findings from a research study designed to understand the gender gap in art museum directorships and to explore potential factors to help AAMD member institutions advance toward greater gender equality.

Through a combination of quantitative analysis and interviews, NCAR and AAMD researchers — led by Zannie Giraud Voss, director of SMU NCAR, and Christine Anagnos, executive director of AAMD — examined the current and historical factors of the gender gap in art museum directorships.

The study, The Gender Gap in Art Museum Directorships, found that women hold fewer than 50 percent of directorships and that the average female director’s salary lags behind that of the average male director — with overall disparities driven by mostly the largest museums. Lead author was Ann Marie Gan, a student in the MA/MBA in Arts Management in SMU’s Cox School of Business and Meadows School of the Arts.

In 2013, AAMD conducted a survey of its members, with 211 responding, or 97 percent. The data collected included each institution’s operating budget, endowment, the director’s or top official’s salary and the director’s gender. Additional research was collected on each director’s tenure in his or her current position and on the position held prior to his or her current directorship. Previous position data was found for 193 of the 211 directors.

Study looked at current state of women in art museum directorships and factors driving any gender gap
The study sought to answer two main questions: What is the current state of women in art museum directorships? What are some factors that may drive the gender gap? The NCAR and AAMD study had several key findings:

— Out of the 211 directors included in the AAMD survey, 90 directors were female; women held 42.6 percent of art museum directorships.

— On average, female directors earned $.79 cents for $1 that male directors earned. In 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the median pay of women nationwide is 82 percent of that of men.

— Segmented by operating budget, these gender disparities are concentrated in museums with a budget of over $15 million roughly the top quarter of museums. In this segment of museums, there are fewer female directors than male directors, and female directors earn less on average than their male counterparts — $.71 cents for $1 a male earns.

— At museums with budgets under $15 million, the number of female directors is nearly equal to the number of male directors, and, on average, the women earn slightly more — $1.02 for every $1 a male director earns.

Directors promoted internally suffer salary disadantage compared to peers hired from the outside
Other factors besides gender that may have influenced the salary and representation differentials noted above were examined through qualitative analysis and interviews with executive search consultants who work with art museums. The study found that a position a director held before entering his or her current position had an effect on average salary: if the person attained the position through internal promotion, he or she was at a salary disadvantage compared to peers hired from other institutions.

Directors who previously held a non-director job were also at a salary disadvantage when compared to their peers who had previously held the top position at another institution. These observations are true for both men and women, but the number of women who have become directors through internal promotion is greater, and these factors may have contributed in part to salary disparities.

A visual summary of the study can be found online at the National Center for Arts Research. In addition to Voss and Anagnos, co-authors of the study are Anne Marie Gan, SMU MA/MBA Class of 2015, and Alison D. Wade, Chief Administrator, Association of Art Museum Directors.

SMU’s Cox School of Business offers a full range of undergraduate and graduate business education programs. — SMU Meadows

Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

Book a live interview

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news