Today is International Women’s Day. It’s a day for celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women – but is also a call to action to accelerate gender equality.
This year’s theme is #PressForProgress.
A recent report from the World Economic Forum suggested that gender parity is over 200 years away – and that’s not good enough.
Within the Fine Arts, gender inequality is still commonplace. In 2016 we wrote about how inequality was present in every facet of Fine Art from the monetary value of artworks to where they were shown.
Unfortunately not much has changed in the last two years; female artists are still underrepresented in museums, undervalued by the art market and scarcely referenced as important contributors to the history of art.
One positive area of progress was the appointment of Maria Balshaw as the first female director of the Tate in 2017, we hope as part of her role she will acknowledge and address Tate’s historic institutional sexism. We also hope that campaign’s like ‘waking the feminists’ and the #pressforprogress hashtag will build on the increasing momentum and hunger for gender equality.