Today I was sent an article from the New York Times about Susan Unterberg, a philanthropist who supports female artists. The item was sent to me “as another example of how women are underpaid and not supported”.
An excerpt:
“They don’t get museum shows as often as men, they don’t command the same prices in the art world,’ [Ms. Unterberg] said. “And it doesn’t seem to be changing.’
Statistics cited by the National Museum of Women in the Arts show that female artists earn 81 cents for every dollar made by male artists; that work by female artists makes up just 3 percent to 5 percent of major permanent museum collections in the United States and Europe; and that of some 590 major exhibitions by nearly 70 institutions in the United States from 2007 through 2013, only 27 percent were devoted to female artists.
“Women continue to be seriously undervalued and underappreciated,’ [artist Carrie Mae] Weems said. “The work is not taken as seriously, and men are still running the game. Men in power support men in power, and they want to see men in power.’
Here we have yet another stubborn “achievement gap”. Why does it exist? The answer endorsed in this article is clearly the one adumbrated just above: a conspiracy of oppression by men. Are we sure? Let’s think about what it takes to become a successful artist.
We should note up front that most artists, the overwhelming majority, are not successful, which means that those who do succeed at making a good living are outliers, a tiny percentile of aspirants who actually possess whatever qualities are necessary for success (and who have, as is necessary for any fruitful endeavor, some good luck as well).
What are those qualities?
1) First of all, and most obviously of all, there is artistic talent. To be successful in a highly competitive market, modest talent probably won’t do (unless compensated by really superior gifts as regards the other necessary qualities). Just as becoming an elite mathematician or physicist requires exceptional native ability, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the same is true in the arts.
2) Next is discipline. It is not enough to have talent; one must also have the self-mastery required to put in thousands of hours, often tedious hours, learning and practicing the skills needed to allow talent to reach its full expression.
3) The visual arts being individual pursuits, one must also have a penchant for solitude, and be willing to put aside much of one’s social life, perhaps including marriage and child-rearing, to spend long hours working alone.
4) To do truly original work, one must also have an indifference to criticism, a willingness to pursue a distinctive vision even in the face of public scorn.
5) Finally, financial success nearly always takes a knack for aggressive self-promotion.
The issue at hand is a statistical gap between the prominence of men and women in the arts. Nobody is suggesting that there aren’t some elite and enormously successful female artists, but rather that the distribution is skewed toward men. Before we can make a diagnosis, then, we must ask, and answer, the essential question: if the qualities listed above are necessary for success in the arts, is their statistical distribution identical in men and women? This is a purely empirical question, and not a political or ideological one.
What about innate talent? Keep in mind that what is needed for success, generally, is not modest talent, but elite gifts, way out on the right tail of the bell-curve. Even if we assume that males and females have the same talent on average, might the distribution be flatter in one sex than the other, meaning that there will be more individuals of one sex than the other out on the tails of the distribution? (This appears to be the case with IQ; there are more males with very high and very low IQ than females.)
The same questions can be asked about the other four qualities. Is it, for example, at least possible that women are statistically less likely to want to work in solitude, and not allow themselves to be distracted by, in particular, the demands of motherhood?
None of this seems to have occurred to the editors of the Times, and no doubt customary attitudes, prejudices, and preferences do indeed make up some part of the picture. But unless we have answers to these questions, it is premature and unwarranted, to say nothing of inflammatory and accusatory, to ascribe all of this achievement gap to the malevolence of men.