Hi everyone. For International Women's Day last year, the AAM shared on their social media accounts a 2019 blog post about the supposed threat posed by a female-majority, "pink collar" museum field. This post maintains that women's growing presence in museum fields will inevitably drive down pay and status. In December, I published an article in Museum Management and Curatorship that disproves this notion, using research by data scientists and sociologists who study twenty-first-century census data. This week, Art Net News published an op ed analyzing exactly how the mythology of "pink collaring" made its way into our field and took root. Here are my questions: Why is this misinformation still circulating? And how do we, as museum professionals committed to public education, ensure that the information we're presenting to the world is accurate?
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Lauren Lessing
Director
University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art
Iowa City IA
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