I can't help but jump in on this particular thread. Having quit a $45,000
year university administrative post to become a starving doctoral student
living on less than half of that (and raising a kid on my own, to boot),
I understand the frustration of museum professionals who work long and
often thankless hours for their institutions, and see peers in other
fields earning large salaries, bonuses, expense accounts etc. My
ex-husband is a software consultant who makes five times what I do, and
half the time he sits around playing Tetris.

So, I decided to focus my dissertation on exploring what might explain
the fact that we as a society give lip service to the importance of the
arts and humanities, including history and museums, but we don't put our
money where our mouth is, as many European nations do. One factor I
believe contributes to this situation (it by no means explains it) is the
evolution of museums as educational institutions over the last 100 years,
and the association of education with women and children. Until very
recently, men have dominated higher education and educational
administration, while classroom teachers have been largely women. Look at
your education department and your docents -- mostly women, right? What
is the big focus for museums these days? Education - entertainment -
families. What is the common denominator? Gender. I believe museums have
become identified as socially "feminine"; and as a result, are accorded
lesser importance and lesser value than traditionally socially
"masculine" institutions such as business, industry or sports.

 Here in Milwaukee there has been a very visible public campaign to build a new
sports stadium for the Brewers. From the media coverage, one gets the
impression that the world will end if the stadium deal falls through.
Every wealthy investor and their brother has advanced a plan to chip in
so the stadium can be built. Breathless, feverish news reports give us
daily updates on the deal. I'm trying hard to imagine anyone getting this
excited over building a new MUSEUM here. I'm not saying that women never
attend baseball games and men never go the museum. I'm saying that what
we are socialized to value reflects a long-standing gender ideology which
places premium value on anything associated with men, and devalues
anything associated with women (anything associated with children, by
proxy, is associated with women due to their childbearing and
childrearing roles). I think this applies to everything from what
products are sold in stores to which insitutions receive governmental
support. The only reason movie and tv stars receive big salaries is that
what they do is now classified as an "industry" or "business" with high
"profit" potential. The "art" (i.e., feminine aspect) has become secondary.

Museum professionals are underpaid and undervalued because what they do
is perceived as "soft", "nonessential", "nonprofit", "educational", and
that means "not all that important", in a society where the dollar is
almighty. Despite the fact that many women make more money than their
husbands, despite the fact that many women support families without any
help from a male breadwinner, despite the fact that most women now work
for a majority of their lives, Americans subconsciously cling to the
mystical ideal of the nuclear family and the male breadwinner.
Until this changes, the arts and humanities will continue to take second
place; museums will take a backseat to baseball stadiums, and museum
professionals will be paid ridiculously low salaries (just as teachers
were and in many cases still are) for work which pays well in other
institutions.


I hope my dissertation research (scheduled to begin this fall) will help
to shed light on this issue, and maybe assist museums in recognizing
their own part in communicating gender ideology.

That's my 2 cents worth (well, in the "real world" maybe 20 cents worth!)

Sally Stanton
Ph D Candidate
Univ. Wisc. Milwaukee