The liability of gender? Constraints and enablers of foreign market entry for female artists

Cultural industries help build creativity-based economies and stimulate worldwide cultural interchanges, but this process faces constraints. One such constraint is unequal treatment of genders. When female artists export cultural products, they face a “liability of gender”, defined as gender specific difficulties in overcoming the liability of foreignness. Both audiences’ gendered expectations and artists’ lack of information about foreign markets will lower women artists’ probability of successfully exporting cultural products, relative to their male counterparts. Differences in education and social network connections strengthen this effect. To investigate this relation and discover how it can be counteracted, we study Korean artists from 2000 to 2015. We document that female artists have more difficulty exhibiting in foreign galleries than males, yet these negative effects can be mitigated by elite education and by participation in art residency programs. Residency programs help female artists to develop networks from their interactions with female peers, but these benefits erode quickly relative to the benefits of education. These findings help us understand how to create a level playing field across genders in worldwide cultural exchanges and suggest that network building institutions such as the art residency programs can effectively reduce gender inequality.