Many thanks for sharing this post, Michael. The authors make an excellent point about the pink collar nature of the museum field. This should be of concern to everyone working and volunteering in this field.
It's important to note that the Andrew Mellon report on staff demographics in museums (2015) looks solely at art museums. Numerous references to the report conflate its figures with the demographics of the museum profession as whole. That's why Joan Baldwin and I use the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to examine the field-wide employment. It, too, has drawbacks, but in the final analysis, its numbers are more reflective of the entire field and those numbers are updated annually. In 2017, the BLS reported 362,000 people working in museums of all types. Of that number, 50.1% of this workforce are classified as women; 79.4% of the entire workforce are classified as white; 12.9% are classified as Black; 9.6% are classified as Hispanic/Latinx; and 3.6% are classified as Asian. The numbers for 2018 will be published in a few months.
The BLS reports an uptick in female employment of a little more than 3% between 2016 and 2017, and I expect this number of will continue to grow steadily over the next decade (to the point where women will be the overwhelming majority of the workforce). Granted, we are dealing in gender binaries here and many writers point out that the male-female binary does not reflect or recognize non-binary gender individuals and transgender people.
The fact remains that the field as a whole is moving toward being a pink collar profession (with some disciplines and departments already firmly in that category). We need to be aware of the implications of this status -- lower pay, poorer benefits, and a "less than" status within institutions themselves (as the authors of the post explain), as well as within society.
There's a great need to educate our governing boards of trustees to these trends as they often perpetuate them within their own ranks. How can AAM help move the needle at the governing board level? (Certainly, the 2017 BoardSource/AAM report, Museum Board Leadership, is a good first step.)
I'm glad so many people are talking and writing about these workplace issues -- they've been consciously and unconsciously ignored for generations.
Onward!
Anne
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Anne W. Ackerson
Creative Leadership & Management Solutions
1914 Burdett Avenue
Troy, New York 12180
T: 518-271-2455
E:
anne@awackerson.com
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