Back in May a dozen friends who work in museums and other art-related organizations met up for drinks. Like many happy hours, the talk turned to work — and especially compensation.
Without exactly meaning to, the group decided to create a crowdsourced spreadsheet where museum staffers could anonymously share their salaries, benefits, race, gender, and other information.
They shared the spreadsheet by email with friends and colleagues, through their social-media accounts, and through the art-history email list of the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. The group also set up a special Twitter account called Art + Museum Transparency to get the word out.
After little more than a month, that spreadsheet included entries from more than 2,500 museum employees worldwide, including workers in Australia, France, and Japan. It shows that pay and benefits differ radically across locations with one stark exception: Low wages are the norm for most of those who don’t hold top director or chief curatorial posts.
That was true even for administrative or curatorial positions that require a Ph.D. or a master’s degree.
Michelle Millar Fisher, one of the people at that happy hour who helped create the spreadsheet, said the group was surprised by the level of interest in their project.
“None of us thought it would become as viral as it did,” said Fisher, an art museum curator and architecture and design historian. “We thought it would remain somewhat under the radar, but obviously it did not.”
Finding Inspiration
Fisher said she and her friends were inspired to create the spreadsheet after seeing findings from a salary survey the Professional Organization for Women in the Arts had conducted earlier this year showing information about salaries segmented by age, position, education, and other factors. They were also motivated by a keynote speech that Kimberly Drew, the creator of the Black Contemporary Art blog and a former social-media manager at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gave at the 2019 American Alliance of Museum’s conference in the spring. Drew spoke about equity and diversity in the museum and art world and said she was paid $5,000 less than a white male predecessor in her former museum job.
Such pay disparities and other challenges surrounding labor and equity issues are not unique to the museum field, say experts.
“Salary and wage issues that museums are seeing are not so different than how this issue is becoming prominent across the country and in every sector,” said Christine Anagnos, executive director of the Association of Art Museum Directors. “I don’t think there’s any museum director out there that doesn’t want to pay people better, but it’s finding a way to do it,” she said.
Exposing Problems
Unlike other parts of the nonprofit world, museums haven’t recovered from the recession a decade ago in terms of their revenue so most are operating on narrower margins and leaner budgets and have to make trade-offs about how to allocate funds, said Laura Lott, who leads the American Alliance of Museums.
Lott said that doesn’t mean directors get a pass and are allowed to ignore the problems surrounding pay and gender equity issues. She said the spreadsheet of salaries and benefits that Fisher and her group instigated is a good start in exposing the problem.
“The transparency that’s there and shining a light on the challenges, the problems, the inequities that do exist is key, and bringing those into the daylight and making people aware and uncomfortable that they exist is key,” said Lott.
The creators of the spreadsheet note that it isn’t a scientific study, and there’s no evidence that it has resulted in higher salaries and more equitable pay practices at museums or at other types of nonprofits. Still, experts say it can be useful to make pay and benefits more transparent and highlight the compensation disparities between genders.
Identifying Pay Gaps
For change to happen, nonprofit leaders must first openly acknowledge to their staffs and boards that their organizations may have pay and gender equity problems, said Lisa Brown Alexander, CEO of Nonprofit HR, a human-resources consulting firm. They then must identify and quantify the pay and other gaps and establish a plan for closing them over time.
“Knowledge goes a long way, but you can’t change what you don’t measure. When you boil it down and you really have numbers in your face, you can’t look away from the problem,” Anagnos said.
While it is not complicated to acknowledge, quantify, and create a plan forward, most nonprofits are not going to be able to fix such problems overnight because they don’t have enough money to support programs and even out salary and other gaps, said Alexander.
“If you are a resource constrained organization or one that relies wholly on grants and contracts for your revenue and you don’t have a lot of unrestricted dollars to draw on to fix the problem, then it becomes more complicated,” said Alexander.
That is where trustees and donors must step in and make a greater commitment to backing infrastructure and general operating support, said experts.
“The nature and history of philanthropy is such that giving to those big operating expenses is frowned upon,” said Lott. “I don’t know where nonprofits are supposed to get that money, but we haven’t figured out how to have funders really understand that and be amenable to it.”
Tough Sell
Making the case for general operating support can be a tough sell when most donors see more value in backing tangibles like programs and building projects. Yet Alexander stresses that over time, underpaid or unfairly compensated employees can become disengaged, leading to a weak, dysfunctional organization and one less able to carry out its mission. The lack of investment in compensation over time hurts nonprofits both programmatically and reputationally as word gets out that staffers are undervalued, she said.
What starts out as a pay equity issue, said Alexander, becomes part of a broader problem that nonprofit leaders and board members need to better understand and prioritize.
“We prioritize finance, fundraising, and programs, and I would say it’s not a three-legged stool; it’s a four-legged stool,” said Alexander. “Programs, finance, fundraising, and people make the difference, and if you believe in people, you’re going to believe in paying them equitably, and you will find the resources to make it happen. Not overnight, but over time.”