"348 of the 2,914 artists in the Tate's collection are women. That's a mere 12%, or 7% if you count it by the proportion of actual artworks by women. But it's hardly a failing unique to the Tate. The National Gallery owns work by just eight women artists, while there are over 400 men represented, which leaves women a measly 2% of the whole. The problem is that, due to a variety of economic and social factors, for most of history [...] women have produced far less art than men. 'Why are there no great women artists?' the art historian Linda Nochlin famously asked in 1971, explaining carefully to both the feminists and the traditionalists that this wasn't because female artists had been overlooked, nor because they weren't any good. There just weren't enough of them to have gained the visibility, the supposed 'greatness', with which so many men had been lauded." - story
