Gender, salaries, and "women's work"

It seems that the typical museum employee is an underpaid woman.

That sentence probably sounds more loaded than I intend it to be. But it doesn't take much familiarity with the museum industry to realize that most of the staff tends to be female, and most of the salaries tend to be on the small side.

There are numerous explanations for both of these issues, and there are numerous hypotheses that seek to relate them. I'm not convinced there's any kind of causal relationship between the two (after all, museum work used to be a male-dominated field), but I do think they're interconnected somehow, even if grappling with this question on more than one occasion hasn't really given me a definite answer.

In my collections management class today, the issue came up again, and my professor passed along a comment that one of her friends had made: men are still the breadwinners (or think they are), so they're not going to go into a poorly-paid field like museum work.

I still don't think that's the only explanation, especially because not every woman who works in a museum is married or otherwise financially supported. But it makes a lot of sense to me, particularly in light of an article I saw a few weeks ago that pointed out the connection between low salaries in female-dominated academic fields. Center for the Future of Museums picked it up on their blog, and the original study is here. I don't think the salaries necessarily started out small - just as museums (and other fields) didn't start out with mostly female staff - but combine the fact that museum workers now are mostly female and that women still generally make less money than men doing the same job, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that there's one reason why salaries are staying low. Perhaps there's a perception, like that of the person our professor mentioned, that most of museum work is done by women who are probably not the primary breadwinners in their families - that this is something they do just because, so a small salary should be more than adequate.

Whatever is causing the imbalance, the fact that museums are dominated by women is interesting in a way - in a sense, it makes women the guardians and interpreters of culture and history. There's a whole lot that could be said about the voices and power this gives to women, who traditionally (in a Western European paradigm, at least) didn't have that much influence - or maybe I'm reading into it too much. Still, the idea that low salaries might have turned the work of cultural interpretation into the domain of women appeals to me.