Portrait by a lady

Why women’s art sells at a discountIt 

It has nothing to do with talent

A ROSE painted by another name would cost more. In a new paper*, four academics show that art made by women sells for lower prices at auction than men’s, and suggest that this discount has nothing to do with talent or thematic choices. It is solely because the artists are female.

The authors used a sample of 1.9m transactions in art auctions across 49 countries in the period from 1970 to 2016. They found that art created by women sold at an average discount of 42% compared with works made by men. However, auction prices can be distorted by a few famous artists whose output is perceived as extremely valuable. If transactions above $1m are excluded, then the discount falls to 19%.

One explanation for this gap could be that women choose different subjects. This is partly true; for example, a higher proportion of women than men paint roses (including Helen Allingham, a British watercolourist: see picture), whereas a smaller share create landscapes. But it turns out that themes that are more associated with female artists sell at a premium, not a discount. Indeed, the researchers could not explain the female discount in terms of other factors such as the size, style or medium of the paintings, or the age of the artist.

In theory, another possibility could be that women are just less talented than men. To test that proposition, the authors conducted a couple of experiments. In one, they showed 1,000 people a selection of 10 lesser-known paintings and asked them to guess the gender of the artists. The respondents were right only 50.5% of the time, no better than tossing a coin. In short, the general public cannot discriminate between male and female art.

In a second test, the researchers used a computer programme to generate paintings and randomly assign the results to artists with male or female names. They then asked participants to rate the paintings and ascribe a value. The experiment found that affluent individuals (those most likely to bid at auctions) attributed a lower value to works which the programme assigned to a woman. Clearly, this gap was unrelated to the artistic merit of the picture.

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