Can female artists succeed if wealthy men don't respect their work?

"Female artists triumph at Bonhams Contemporary Art sale," ran the headline on a press release last week. Unusually, half of the top 10-selling works in that sale were by women artists. So, is gender parity proving more than just a pipe dream in the art market?

A report by Sotheby's and databank Artnet found that of the $196.6 billion spent on art at auction between 2008 and 2019, work by women accounted for just $4 billion, or around two per cent.

Photographer Catherine Opie said the reason men's art is more expensive is not because it is better, but because men are the main buyers. "Men rule the roost in relationship to capitalism," she says. "They are still the default go-to for collecting by museums and the market."

Renée Adams, a professor of finance at Oxford University, describes this as "discrimination". Her research, testing over 2,000 participant responses to artworks bearing fictitious names, showed that wealthy men tend to have a lower regard for art by women. But this pattern is changing. A report on art spending by Art Basel and UBS in March estimated that spending by high-net-worth female collectors in 2020 rose by 13 per cent, and that they spent more than men.

In addition, the Artnet report stated that the volume of sales of art by women more than doubled from $230 million to $595 million between 2008 and 2018. According to the Sotheby's Mei Moses Indices, which measure price movements of the same work of art over time, the rise for female artists outpaced that for their male counterparts by 29 per cent between 2013 and 2019.

One of the reasons for this shift is the perception that, because women's art has been sidelined historically, it is a bargain. "There's going to be a gold rush, because some wonderful art and phenomenal artists have been neglected," said Professor William Goetzmann of the Yale School of Management.

Now auctioneers have sensed this shift, and Sotheby's, Christie's and Bonhams have all committed to staging their first women-only art auctions. Sotheby's has titled its sale this month "(Women) Artists", and quotes the surrealist Dorothea Tanning: "'Women artists' - it's just as much a contradiction in terms as 'man artist' or 'elephant artist.'"

Tanning, who was overshadowed by her lover Max Ernst, is included in the mix, along with another artist emerging from the shadow of her male partner - Françoise Gilot, 99, once Picasso's muse, whose portrait of their daughter, Paloma, carries one of her highest estimates yet at up to £180,000. The sale is led by a small 1992 self-portrait by Jenny Saville (£250,000), who holds the record of £9.5 million for a living female artist.

Christie's has just announced its first all-woman sale, "Women in Art", in Paris in June. "It is possible that prices for women will rival the men one day," says auctioneer Cécile Verdier, "but that is not the purpose of our sale. Our priority is to shine a light on lesser-known artists, especially among the Old Masters."

Owners jumped at the idea, says her Old Master specialist Alice Chevrier, pointing to a neoclassical pastel family portrait by the 18th-century artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, an advocate of women's rights, which is being sold by a descendant of Baron Eugène von Rothschild, who wanted to sell in this auction. Estimated at up to €150,000 (£130,000), it should realise one of the highest prices for the artist.

In the calendar at the end of September is "Blazing a Trail", a sale of modern British women artists at Bonhams, with a superb, rediscovered 1950s painting of a fisherman by the underrated Prunella Clough, at a very attractive £20,000 estimate.

The sales, which are not expected to generate more than a couple of million pounds each, are not looking for the biggest totals, but they are attempting to capitalise on the perceived rise in value of work by women artists, and to raise awareness of their potential.

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