By Marjorie Schwarzer

This article was published in Museum News, May/June issue of 2007.

Never losing faith, we waited through many years of struggle to achieve our rights. But women weren’t just waiting; women were working.
—Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, 2007

She relied on her wits and inexhaustible capacity for hard work. It had to be that way. Juliana Force, appointed as director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1929, had no training in art. She came from a poor family and never had the opportunity to attend college. Force rose to the helm of one of the nation’s top art institutions through a carefully constructed social network.

Nevertheless, her biographer Avis Berman tells us, she endured insults and criticism. Despite her close relationship with the museum’s founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Force was given the unflattering title of “Ugly Duchess” and was accused of being an “interloper.” Yet in her time Juliana Force was one of the most powerful leaders of the art museum world, wielding considerable influence over the direction of collecting, exhibiting and funding. Today she is recognized for her pivotal role in advancing the careers of American artists including Edward Hopper and George Bellows. Throughout her remarkable career, Force advocated that people should form their own opinions and trust their intuition. “Think for yourself” was her mantra.

For more than a century, American museums have offered women more high-level opportunities than almost any other profession. Women have responded by contributing a profound social and public service dimension to the field. However, a gender imbalance remains.

Recent workplace studies show that women approach institution-building differently from men. Women are humanity’s great weavers of social fabric. They encourage collaboration, consensus and community. They value interpersonal relationships and intuitive decision-making. Male executives typically attribute their success to strategic thinking. Women in high positions often credit their social networks, their mentors and an ability to “think on their feet.”

Today, in sheer numbers, museums tilt strongly toward women. If one looks at data across museums of all sizes, disciplines and regions, women compose the majority of visitors. They attend more educational programs than men. They spend more money on audio guides and in the store and café. They spend more time serving as volunteers. But nowhere is their presence more apparent than as paid professionals. Women compose about 63 percent of all professional and senior-level staff in the field, twice the average representation of men. The percentage may be even higher if one counts women who are currently serving as interim directors, consultants and heads of professional associations and university-based museum studies programs.

In the absence of field- and nationwide data, my numbers were distilled from several sources, including the 2006 salary and statistical surveys of the Museum Association of New York (MANY) and California Association of Museums (CAM). I also manually counted women among senior staff in the 2005 Official Museum Directory on about 200 randomly selected pages. In addition, I tallied the attendance lists of the 2006 American Association of Museums annual meeting, as well as that of the Western Museums Association. The results were remarkably consistent, although the percentage of women holding leadership positions in western and southern states is slightly higher than on the East Coast.

Despite women’s presence, men dominate museums in two critical areas: power and money. Men hold sway over boards of directors, major donor lists and pay scales. They occupy 53 percent of executive director positions and 75 percent of CEO seats at the nation’s largest and best-funded institutions. And although the gender pay gap is narrowing from previous decades, women museum professionals earns, on average, 78 cents to every dollar earned by men in similar positions.

How have these gender imbalances shaped the internal culture of museums? What can we learn by examining our profession through the prism of gender? Does considering women’s roles help us to clarify women’s status in the profession and prepare a vision for the future? In researching this article and talking to men and women of all ages, I learned that as controversial as discussions about gender can be, museums have a lot to learn by engaging in them. We can begin by assessing the leadership qualities that women have historically brought to America’s cultural institutions. We can continue by paying attention to current research on gender and leadership styles, how women tend to approach their work differently from men. And finally, by addressing challenges we can create more equilibrium for both men and women and ultimately our institutions.

An Astonishing Journey: Women and the Museum Field

It could be said that the power of women in our field reverberates from the root of the very word “museum”: home to the muses, nine ancient Greek sister-goddesses of art and culture. Here in the United States, women have influenced museums less as goddesses and more as crusaders. This started after the Revolutionary War, when the foundational activities of American society—land development, business, politics and warfare—were closed to women. Wanting to make their mark on the new nation, upper-class women started benevolence societies dedicated to humanitarian aims such as temperance, health care and the abolition of slavery. Even though they were not allowed to make public speeches or even chair meetings, women approached the behind-the-scenes tasks of benevolence work with a high degree of focus and efficiency. Many proved adept at raising funds and setting up organizational structures. The secret to success, one early women’s committee noted, was “co-operation, faith, work.”

After the Civil War, women were pushed to the margins of the very organizations they had founded. “Male values were viewed as necessary to control and limit a female effusion of emotion, sensibility or passion … [men took over the] centers of power for social change,” writes Lori Ginzberg in her book Women and the Work of Benevolence (1990). Women gravitated to the more “ladylike” causes of culture and the arts. Nascent museums were ideal places for them to offer their considerable organizational skills and passion for public service. Wealthy women such as Berthe Potter Palmer were active collectors of paintings and decorative arts objects that were the foundation for some of the nation’s most important art museums, such as the Art Institute of Chicago. Palmer, who headed the women’s committee for Chicago’s 1893 world exposition, combined a “keen business mind” with “a sense of social responsibility,” according to Aline B. Saarinen’s The Proud Possessers.

History museums also benefited from women’s commitment to public service. In their earliest incarnations, the country’s antiquarian societies had existed as exclusive and at times secret all-male clubs. In the mid-19th century, women launched the historic preservation movement, a far more community-minded enterprise. Perhaps best known is Ann Pamela Cunningham’s hard-fought effort to save George Washington’s home from decay by organizing the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, a prototype for the women’s committees that would spring up on behalf of history and culture throughout the nation.

Women’s mission to preserve history spread westward in the early decades of the 20th century. “In the West, women have always had the freedom to excel in scholarly and creative fields,” says Joyce Ice, director of Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art. They led several innovative efforts. In Arizona, Sharlot Hall, the state’s first historian, established a museum in Prescott to preserve the story of early pioneers. Wyoming’s cowboy and ranching lore found a home at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, created by its namesake’s niece, Mary Jester Allen. Navajo religious objects were preserved in one of the nation’s first Native American museums, founded in Santa Fe by collector Mary Cabot Wheelwright.

Dedication to educating children about the disappearing natural world propelled women to become active in the day-to-day operations of urban museums, especially in New England. Such was the case at the Worcester Natural History Society in Massachusetts, run from 1885 to 1894 by Olive Morrow, an expert fish taxidermist, who netted a whopping salary of $9 a week. In the ensuing decades, amidst growing concerns about industrialization and child labor, women founded and ran scores of nature and youth museums. At AAM conferences during the 1900s, they presented scholarly papers urging museums to devote more resources to children’s education.

Chances are high that if you work in a museum that existed in the 1910s and ’20s, women played strong leadership roles there. Many were suffragists who had marched for the right to vote. Others were advocates for the civil rights of African Americans and Native Americans. Still others challenged the aesthetic status quo, promoting modern art and Bauhaus design and launching the country’s first contemporary art museums. A long list of largely forgotten, talented women ascended to top positions in all kinds of museums during these decades. For example, Cornelia Bentley Sage Quinton headed Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Museum from 1910 to 1923, and Maude Briggs Knowlton became director of the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, N.H., in 1929. Even organizations with prominent men at the helm, such as the Newark Museum and Museum of Modern Art, were staffed and managed almost entirely by women.

After World War II, women’s power within the institution receded. The Works Progress Administration federal job creation program had tilted the staffing balance toward men. Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, museum jobs were attractive to men, especially war veterans who had become entranced with European and Asian culture while stationed abroad. With the country basking in its military victory, management books emulated a top-down model of doing business. Words such as “tactic,” “strategic target” and “bullet points” came into vogue. Men brought these hierarchical models to museums and disavowed values like collaboration and consensus. Once again, many women were pushed to the margins of institutions they had founded and led. Sometimes female work habits were looked at as neurotic and unhealthy.

Women responded by reinvigorating their traditional means of influencing museum operations: the volunteer association. Often dismissed as white-glove social clubs, volunteer councils had a strong practical dimension and were essential to daily operations and fund-raising. Paid male directors and curators strode in the corridors of power and formed the tight alliance known as the old-boy’s club, while unpaid women toured visitors through exhibitions and planned membership drives and glittering galas, bringing in the hard cash.

The old-boy’s club thrived. During the 1960s, women once again took to the streets, demanding fair treatment and equal pay for equal work, yet cultural institutions largely remained bastions of sexism. In 1968, for example, the field issued a seminal report documenting museums’ needs for government support. The Belmont Report was formulated entirely by men (but typed by women) and contained no mention of the contributions of female founders or volunteers. Yet to frame the importance of visiting museums and viewing collections in the flesh, it offered this telling analogy: “The superiority of objects over words is summed up by the museum curator who said: ‘Girls are more interesting than descriptions of girls.’ This may well be the definitive statement on the subject.” And that may well be a definitive statement on the field’s stated attitude toward women during the middle decades of the 20th century.

Enter the Baby Boomers

If a woman can become president of a university, a mayor, a jet pilot, an industrial engineer or an architect, becoming a museum director seems almost tame by comparison.—Kendall Taylor, Museum News, 1985

In 1971, the director of the Brockton (later Fuller) Art Museum near Boston asked a colleague to recommend “a few good men” for a curator opening. The best man for Brockton turned out to be a young female art historian named Marilyn Hoffman. Three years later she was appointed director. Hoffman’s rise presaged the entry of baby boomer women into the museum world. The field was growing, in part due to new sources of funding spawned by the Belmont Report. Feminist consciousness was also growing, and boards were once again open to hiring qualified women for prominent positions. “We proved that, when given the chance, we could do the job,” says Hoffman.

Women of this generation had a new attitude. Like Hoffman, many had grown up in families with strong female role models who encouraged them to develop a fulfilling career. As active participants in the nation’s rising feminist movement, they were willing to take on the establishment and fight for equal treatment in the workplace. Hundreds of women began their museum careers during the 1970s. As young women, they brought energy and dynamism to a field that was branching out in new directions. They founded children’s and discovery museums, art centers and local historical societies and updated older ones. They advocated for the increased stature of registrars, educators and fund-raisers. They exposed the issues of the gender pay gap, the glass ceiling and sexual harassment. And those at the top worked hard to convince male-dominated boards that women were capable of making tough financial decisions and representing the museum in the business community. In short, they learned how to play in a man’s world, mastering the rules of hierarchy, boardroom politics and other “games that mother never taught them,” to paraphrase the title of a popular management book of the time. This was the generation that dreamed of having it all: education, career, family, museum as social change agent. Some paid a high personal price for their ideals: grueling work hours, loneliness, divorce, exhaustion, burnout. There was also a significant financial price; in 1979, women earned 65 cents to every dollar of an equally qualified man. Moreover, many institutions’ corridors of power remained closed to women. At the close of the 1970s, less than 10 percent of the nation’s largest art museums had a female director.

During the 1980s, women went beyond taking care of museums to taking care of themselves. They were “planning their careers with more care and precision than did women of earlier generations” and charting paths in a determined and logical way that would mesh family and career demands, reported Kendall Taylor in the February 1985 issue of Museum News. They sought training and academic credentials, attending universities in larger numbers than ever before. In 1982, for the first time in the nation’s history, more women than men earned a bachelor’s degree, a trend that would grow in the coming decades. They also sought mentors—both male and female—who could show them the ropes. As women became more visible and high-powered in the field, others were inspired. New talent flooded into museums. An old-girl network began to supplant the old-boy one. Women formed such support groups as ArtTable and the Women Director’s Group of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD).

“That bonding changed the dynamic,” says Hoffman. The field took notice. Publications like Jane Glaser and Artemis Zenetou’sGender Perspectives: Essays on Women in Museums urged women to become more familiar with feminist scholarship, take their role as mentors to other women seriously and be “active in museums as fully as possible.” In 1987, the National Museum of Women in the Arts opened in Washington, D.C. Founded by collector Wilhelmina Cole Holladay, it was the first museum in the country dedicated to showcasing women artists. In the next decade, museums dedicated to women’s perspectives would be founded across the nation, in cities like Boulder, Colo., Dallas and San Francisco. In 1994, women advanced on an even larger playing field. The American Association of Museums elected its first female board chair, Nina Archabal, director of the Minnesota Historical Society. A participant in the creation of AAM’s seminal 1992 report Excellence and Equity, Archabal worked hard to open doors—not only to the boardroom but also for diverse staff and audiences.

The Changing Dynamic of Leadership

During the 1990s, women’s newfound visibility in museums converged with multiculturalism and a changing economic climate to challenge museums to find new ways of doing business. Attracting diverse audiences and collaborating with other organizations became central tenets of successful practice. Across all industries and businesses, management gurus advised executives to focus their energies on listening to and developing a sense of shared values with communities, and connecting more with partners at a personal and emotional level. Ironically, these were the very skills that had allowed women to thrive in museums for decades.

 “Emotional intelligence,” or EQ, a term popularized by psychologist Daniel Goleman, emerged as an essential attribute for this new leadership style. EQ skills include empathy, social poise, self-knowledge and intuition. After testing thousands of men and women in a variety of workplaces for EQ, Goleman confirmed that women had an edge. In Working with Emotional Intelligence (2000), he reported his findings that “women, on average, are more aware of their emotions, show more empathy, and are more adept interpersonally.” Researcher Sally Helgesen identified additional stylistic advantages possessed by mothers in leadership positions in corporations: “Motherhood is being recognized as an excellent school for managers, demanding many of the same skills: … the balancing of conflicting claims, teaching, guiding, leading, monitoring, handling disturbances, imparting information . . . [As one executive put it] ‘if you can figure out which one gets the gumdrop, the 4-year-old or the 6-year-old, you can negotiate any contract in the world.” In scores of studies conducted by organizational psychologists, women consistently scored higher (and at times significantly higher) on measures for leadership success, including “motivating and inspiring others,” “developing and maintaining social networks,” “valuing social interaction in the workplace,” “being collaborative” and “listening.” Despite the stereotype of women as gabbers and men as strong and silent types, the opposite actually played out in research; men, on average, talk more in business settings and women do more of the listening and implementing. As the 21st century opened, mainstream journals like Business Week, Newsweek and Fortune ran articles about the importance of “female” skills to all businesses striving to survive in the global marketplace.

Of course, women couldn’t do it alone. Studies also revealed that men tend to excel in several qualities necessary in a challenging business environment. In terms of EQ, men test as more self-confident and optimistic, with an ability to adapt more easily to change and handle stress better than women. Men also score higher, on average, in “strategic thinking” and “analysis of data.” Some studies even present evidence of the negative side of women’s leadership styles, reporting on phenomena like “catfights” between women in the workplace. As Sally Helgesen and Marta Williams conclude in their 2006 study “Men and Women: Differing Drivers in the Development of Senior Executive Talent,” “organizations must keep gender differences in mind when approaching the development of talent. Women have particular challenges that need to be understood and addressed.” With so many women cracking the glass ceiling, books appeared to facilitate optimal relationships in female-dominated offices, as well as identify the psychological hurdles that some women still faced as they assumed the mantle of leadership.

In the Company of Women by Pat Heim, Susan Murphy and Susan Golant (2003) is one such resource. The authors identify psychological cornerstones of women’s interactions in the workplace. One, not surprisingly, is relationships. Women take their workplace relationships more seriously than men. Many are easily hurt when they perceive that a co-worker has betrayed them. Another is self-esteem, which women possess in far less abundance than men. Men tend to recover from a botched project quickly and move on to the next thing, whereas women are more likely to blame themselves and wallow in feelings of failure. Many high-performing women, the authors assert, especially those of the baby boomer generation, still believe deep down that they don’t deserve their successes.

Even though these workplace dynamics—good and bad—play out in museums, our field has yet to consider these studies about differing leadership styles. Some misgivings about research into gender dynamics are understandable. Psychological testing doesn’t factor in individual circumstances or personality types. Misinterpreted data might support stereotypes, bias and inappropriate behavior. We all know individuals who fall outside the bell curve of research results: men, for example, who are excellent listeners and women who are not. Yet some of the museum field’s trepidation stems from its hardwired fear of acknowledging changing attitudes, especially on the part of baby boomer women of this author’s generation who fought so hard for a place at the head of the table. Younger women see things differently. As Helen Molesworth, curator of contemporary art at the Harvard University Art Museums, states, “I belong to the generation of post-Title 9 women who were part of a huge philosophical sea change. Our grandmothers and mothers had the ‘feminist moment’ where they fought for equality and sisterhood. To my generation, this equality of opportunity is a given. We are comfortable discussing gender differences because my generation cut its teeth on the politics of difference. Fundamentally, I see valuing the differences between genders as healthy for museums.”

In 2006, the Museum Association of New York (MANY) led by Anne Ackerson conducted a preliminary survey of its members to ascertain their impressions of gender and leadership. “We hit a nerve with this,” reports the survey. “First, female respondents outnumbered male respondents by more than two to one. Women said they were far better (by margins of two to 16 times as much) than men at communicating vision/mission/values, getting the work done, group dynamics, multitasking, strategic thinking/planning and working well with others. The men . . .  considered themselves better at strategic thinking and planning by a margin of three to one. . . . What’s more, both sexes rated men far better at confidence and risk taking.”

Interest in studying women’s contributions to museums is growing.  In 2005, Victor Danilov published Women and Museums, a comprehensive guide to hundreds of museums and halls of fame in the nation devoted to pioneering women of all professionals and backgrounds. He is former president of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry and husband of Toni Dewey, who founded Boulder’s Women of the West Museum (now part of the Museum of the American West in Los Angeles). He notes that his book presents “only the beginning of the study needed to fully demonstrate the enormous impact of women in one of America’s most prized cultural fields.”  Nonetheless, it is a valuable and long overdue resource.

Men and Women in the 21st-Century Museum

As a new generation of women and men is entering the museum profession, it is worth asking what the future holds for them. Generation X is accustomed to interacting with women in powerful positions. Thus, younger professionals see the gender gap differently from their mothers. Many feel that it may be time for museums to go beyond the “old girl network” and more thoughtfully leverage the talents of both genders. As Miegan Riddle, director of membership and outreach at the Berkeley Art Museum, puts it, “I’ve worked mainly with women in my career, but I’ve found that it’s healthier when the team is more balanced. More diverse ideas and styles come when both men and women are at the table.” Nathan Richie, education programs manager at the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum in Chicago, agrees: “Doesn’t it make sense to have men and women at all levels in museums? If there is a balance of genders working well together, there will be more decorum in the workplace, better brainstorming in meetings and ultimately better exhibitions and programs for the public.” Achieving this equilibrium, however, is no easy task. The field needs to address age-old issues of poor compensation, lack of research and documentation and reluctance to create an innovative internal culture.

When women congregate in the lower-paying rungs of a profession that demands a high level of skill and training, a field is said to become “feminized.” Museums, unfortunately, may fall prey to this phenomenon. Yet the issue of pay is critical to recruiting talent into the field. “I don’t think there is overt discrimination in museums because there are so many women, but systemically there is a problem because of pay,” says Rachel Orlins-Bergman, director and curator at the Yolo County Historical Museum in Woodland, Calif. “Some positions are so underpaid that a lot of men wouldn’t even consider them. The only reason I can be in my position is that I’m married to someone who can support us financially.”

Can women afford to tolerate low compensation? As one deputy director in her 30s told me, “I love what I do and I’m not greedy, but I simply can’t survive on what I’m paid. Either I have to find a rich spouse or leave the field.” Or, as Orlins-Bergman warns, “What’s in store for me 10 years down the road? Will there be a place for me in museums? What will my skills be worth on the open market?”

Low compensation also causes the brain drain to flow in the other direction. Men are less inclined toward entry-level positions because of pay scales. While a woman tends to work her way up the rungs of the ladder of museum work through training, apprenticeship and on-the-ground experience, a man is more likely to vault up the “glass escalator” to the higher-paid position of department head or director. Putting men with less experience and training in charge of women with more experience and training sets up a dynamic of frustration and turnover that benefits no one. Why can’t museums push the principles of wage equity and advancement opportunity? Several of my interviewees strongly urge boards of directors to implement compensation packages and hiring mechanisms that address this imbalance. They feel that even though staff treat women and men with equal respect, boards are still more comfortable with men in director positions and are thus more willing to invest in them financially, ultimately feeding a dysfunctional system that hurts all museums.

Fortunately, some state and regional museum professional associations collect salary and financial information that documents the gender pay gap in order to help museums make more informed decisions about compensation. Yet the field lacks data and documentation on deeper challenges at play as museums strive for gender balance. Three areas that deserve more study are working mothers, gays and lesbians and the impact of gender on exhibition and program content.

How can museums, given that they lack the resources of the for-profit sector, better support mothers of young children so they can manage their jobs without neglecting family responsibilities? Museums, especially those with children’s discovery galleries and extended public hours, are uniquely positioned to offer onsite childcare and flexible work schedules. Why has our field lagged in experimenting with such arrangements and sharing effective models with other institutions? Where are the inspiring stories of museum workers who have successfully integrated their children and work lives?

Likewise, a discussion of gender is incomplete without considering the substantial history of lesbians and gays in our field. Where are the stories of our gay and lesbian leaders? Although they have made immense professional contributions to museums for well over 100 years, documentation is virtually nonexistent. What can we learn from considering why so many lesbians and gays have excelled in our field? What does this longstanding openness say about museums? What obstacles have been unique to museums? Why is there still covert discrimination in some corners of the field? How can we support more tolerance for diverse lifestyles in our workforce?

Another vital question is how the gender of decision-makers has influenced the content of collections, exhibitions, programs and ultimately audiences. Some children’s museums and science centers have addressed gender and content, intentionally developing programs targeted to engaging girls in science. A successful example is “Power Girl” at the Children’s Discovery Museum in San Jose, Calif., developed in the early 1990s when evaluators observed that parents were three times as likely to explain science content in exhibitions to boys as girls. But do initiatives exist to engage boys in subjects like history and art? Nathan Richie has studied gender patterns in art museum visitation and sees “a link between who works in museums and who visits. When male curators at art museums started doing exhibitions of motorcycles and cars, male attendance at those museums rose significantly. But the art museum world was cynical. Is it so wrong for art museums to admit that certain themes appeal more to one gender than another?”

Rachel Orlins-Bergman agrees. She would like to see her history museum move away from “tea parties and exhibitions of old hats” to programs that appeal more to men but feels that this could be a hard sell to some long-time volunteers. Conversely, Helen Molesworth believes that art museum directors are risk-averse in the other direction and have failed to engage feminist artas fully as their positions allow them. “Whatever gender parity has been achieved institutionally, it has not been achieved in exhibitions and galleries. Even though museums have acquired more artwork by women since the mid-1970s, there is a discrepancy between what’s collected and what’s shown. The art historical canon remains patriarchal; directors may challenge the rules of the workplace but not in their choices of exhibition themes.” The truth, however, is that we have only anecdotes about gender, content and attendance; hard data would be useful to better serve and attract audiences.

Since they began to dot the American landscape, museums have been special workplaces that have allowed women and others on the margins of society to participate more fully than in the greater society. In turn, women have pushed institutions to rise above norms and advance the nation’s thinking in new directions—toward the importance of appreciating our past, experiencing beauty, living in the natural world, contemplating artistic vision, connecting with others.