On Gender Statistics in the Art Field and Leading Positions in the International Sphere

In her analysis of the situation of women artists, Katrin Hassler makes a strong distinction between academic and activist analyses of statistics. Her own academic research tackles the ways in which women artists appear in three sources: ArtFacts.Net; KunstKompass and Artinvestor. She contrasts the position of women curators/museum directors/gallerists with the situation of women artists in several key surveys of the art market/art world, points to the absence of attention to gender as a factor of analysis in many studies and highlights the asymmetrical distribution of women artists compared to women gallerists/museum directors working in the field as a whole. Using Bourdieu, she explores this further through presenting the idea of "dominated dominants" to describe the actual situation of women in the "social room" of the art sphere.