New AI Tool Reveals Galleries’ Gender Balance

An art historian aiming to encourage “a global movement of matronage” has designed an AI tool that reveals the gender balance of any gallery’s artist roster.

The tool’s designer, Hall W Rockefeller, hopes it will advance the mission of Less Than Half, an arts network she founded to raise the profile of women artists. Putting her own stamp on her family’s longstanding legacy of support for the arts, she aims to mobilise her community of women art collectors to influence institutions and the market through being intentional with their purchasing power. 

“I want people to notice the very apparent discrepancies and inequalities between men and women artists and the systematic ways in which women artists are kept from succeeding,” Rockefeller told Ocula.

Aside from buying art by women, “we want to support the people who are supporting women artists,” Rockefeller said. “That means supporting galleries who make a distinct point of representing women artists, supporting the development of their work, careers, and building legacies.”

The AI tool allows anyone to check whether a gallery is “Less Than Half Approved”—that is, whether 50 percent or more of its artist stable are women or identify as non-binary. A user can feed the URL of a gallery’s artist roster into the tool to see the breakdown, and galleries that pass the 50 percent benchmark can display a digital sticker to signal their approval status to community members. 

According to the app, women make up 35 percent of David Zwirner’s 86-artist roster, 27 percent of Gagosian’s more than 100 artists and 43 percent of Hauser & Wirth’s 113-strong stable of artists and estates. Previously, Rockefeller’s organisation had to assemble this kind of data manually, but AI “makes it a lot easier to do”, she said. The tool isolates each artist’s name, researches them online, and assigns a gender label.

Although there are occasional fumbles, “It’s quite good at figuring out the nuances,” Rockefeller said. “If someone uses they/them pronouns it labels them as a non-binary artist. It can understand a collective or artist duo and that also figures into the numbers.”

The art historian, who collects art herself, believes there is a strong financial case for galleries to get on board. Indeed, Art Basel and UBS’s 2025 Global Survey of Collecting found that high-net-worth women are more likely to collect women artists, holding an average of nine percent more women artists in their collections. They also spent 46 percent more than their male counterparts on art and antiques in 2024. 

“Risk is also a really interesting thing when you look at investment behaviour,” Rockefeller said, referencing the finding that women are 25 percent more likely to buy works by newly discovered or unknown artists.

“When it comes to investing in the stock market, women are more risk-averse, but in the art market they are more likely to follow their own personal tastes: they’re not buying canonical artists, and not following trends.”

In a downturned art market, she argues, these collectors are undertargeted. “This is a consumer that is more likely to buy, and more likely to take risks,” Rockefeller said. “Especially for the middle market, the female collector is the figure that could really be the lifeline for a lot of these struggling mid-tier galleries we’re hearing so much about.”

There’s a lesson in there for the top of the market, too. UBS and Art Basel’s 2026 Art Market Report found that the gender gap widened at galleries with a turnover above $10 million (see: Gagosian, Zwirner, and Hauser & Wirth, above). That gap is worth considering as we look to the great wealth transfer, where trillions of dollars are expected to change hands over the next decades.

“A lot of that wealth is going to women: to widows, to daughters,” Rockefeller said. “There’s a generation that is about to really come into their own, whether it’s inheriting money, or women are succeeding professionally as well, so I think there is a real opportunity for the big, blue-chip, international mega galleries to start courting that woman and taking her seriously.”