Gender-balanced programming: reaching parity without quotas

01The current landscape: real progress, persistent inequalities

The art world has made progress. Major international fairs — Art Basel, Frieze, FIAC now Paris+ — present a growing number of women artists. Leading institutions dedicate ambitious retrospectives to their work: Louise Bourgeois at the Centre Pompidou, Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern, Cecily Brown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The market has followed: auction records for works by women artists are multiplying, as demonstrated by results for Jenny Saville, Cecily Brown and Yayoi Kusama at Christie's and Sotheby's.

These advances should not mask structural inequalities. The most powerful galleries continue to represent a majority of men. Average prices for works by women artists remain lower than those of their male counterparts at comparable career stages. Access to institutional exhibitions, though improving, remains unbalanced.

The gallery plays a decisive role in this equation. It is the dealer who chooses the artists they represent, who determines the exhibition rhythm, who negotiates institutional placements and who sets prices. Each programming decision has a direct impact on the visibility and career of women artists.

02Why quotas are problematic

Imposing strict quotas — fifty per cent women, fifty per cent men — appears to offer a simple solution. Several reasons explain why this approach is debatable.

The quota reduces the artist to their gender. An artist chosen because she is a woman rather than for the quality of her work finds herself in an uncomfortable position: she is perceived as a beneficiary of a corrective measure rather than as deserving of her place. This perception, even when unjust, can harm her credibility with collectors and institutions.

Quotas can lead to forced programming. A gallery representing ten artists that imposes a strict parity quota will sometimes have to pass on an artist whose work perfectly fits its line in order to respect the numerical balance. This artificial constraint can weaken programme coherence.

Quotas ignore the complexity of contemporary identities. The male-female binary does not account for the diversity of gender identities that characterises the current art scene. A quota system founded on this binary is necessarily reductive.

03The structural awareness approach

The alternative to quotas is structural awareness: permanent attention to the biases that guide the dealer's decisions, without imposing rigid numerical rules.

The first bias is familiarity. Dealers tend to choose artists who resemble them — same social background, same education, same network. In an art world historically dominated by men, this familiarity bias mechanically reproduces existing imbalances. A dealer conscious of this bias deliberately broadens their prospecting field: they visit studios they would not have visited, attend juries and prizes they did not previously follow, consult curators whose networks differ from their own.

The second bias is market-driven. A dealer who selects artists based on their immediate commercial potential mechanically favours artists whose market is already established — and those artists, for historical reasons, are more often men. Investing in the career of a woman artist whose market is still developing requires longer-term commitment, but galleries that have done so have often reaped the rewards.

Gladstone Gallery represented artists such as Shirin Neshat and Sarah Lucas when their markets were still nascent. Hauser & Wirth invested massively in Louise Bourgeois's career, contributing to the recognition of an artist whose historical importance is now beyond dispute. Galerie Lelong & Co. has represented major women artists for decades, including Ana Mendieta and Nalini Malani, with a curatorial logic that never needed quotas to achieve balance.

04Practical steps for the dealer

A dealer wishing to move towards parity without imposing quotas can draw on several levers.

The annual programme review consists of examining the programme's composition over the past three to five years: how many solo exhibitions by women, how many by men? What proportion of turnover? What institutional placements? This factual analysis, free of moral judgement, makes it possible to measure reality and identify any imbalances.

Diversifying discovery sources is a powerful lever. Prizes reserved for women artists, such as the Prix AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions) in France, residencies that favour underrepresented artists, exhibitions organised by curators committed to parity: these spaces constitute talent pools that the dealer can explore systematically.

Differentiated support recognises that women artists face specific constraints. Maternity, for example, can interrupt or slow a career significantly. A dealer who anticipates these periods, who maintains communication about the artist during her absence and preserves her place in the exhibition calendar, demonstrates a commitment that goes beyond simple representation.

05The role of collectors and institutions

Parity within a gallery is not built in isolation. Collectors and institutions play a decisive role.

Collectors who make a deliberate choice to acquire works by women artists send a powerful market signal. Some collectors, such as Pamela Joyner in the United States, have built collections centred on underrepresented artists and have contributed, through their acquisitions and loans to institutions, to shifting the balance of the art world.

Institutions that programme retrospectives of women artists, that bring their works into permanent collections and include them in art-historical narratives contribute to legitimising their work in the market's eyes. The Centre Pompidou, with exhibitions devoted to Niki de Saint Phalle, Dorothea Tanning and Germaine Richier, has played a major role in the institutional recognition of these artists.

06Parity as programme enrichment

The most convincing argument for parity is not moral: it is aesthetic and commercial. An exclusively male programme deprives the gallery of half of contemporary creation. The perspectives, sensibilities, themes and forms that women artists bring enrich the gallery's proposition and broaden its audience.

Galleries whose programmes are naturally balanced — without quotas, through curatorial conviction — attract a diverse clientele that values this openness. Young collectors in particular are attentive to programme composition and favour galleries whose choices reflect the diversity of contemporary creation.

For Artedusa partner galleries, the platform offers equitable visibility to all represented artists, regardless of gender, in a space where work quality is the sole criterion for discovery.