Women Collectors Spend More and Buy Earlier: What Dealers Should Change

One of the largest surveys of wealthy collectors split its sample almost evenly by gender on purpose, and the result is hard to ignore. Of 3,100 high-net-worth collectors in ten markets, 1,575 of them women, the women spent on average 46% more than the men on art and antiques in 2024. Fifty-five percent of the women said they bought work by unknown artists frequently or often, against 44% of the men, although both judged such purchases risky in about the same proportions (Arts Economics and UBS, 2025).

For a dealer with a program of living artists, that makes a woman the likeliest early backer of an unproven name, and among younger collectors the bigger spender on average. Her collection also leans toward women artists, whose resale record is still thin. The galleries that gain from this will treat her as the buyer of record, hand her documentation that turns a risk into a decision, and build programs around what she already collects.

What the 46% measures

Read the average carefully before building on it. Women collectors averaged $519,960 on art and antiques in 2024, 46% above men, “despite buying the same number of works on average”, while median spending was “relatively aligned” (Arts Economics and UBS, 2025). In fine art alone, women averaged $178,240 and men $128,590. The gap sits at the top of the distribution, not with the typical buyer.

Where it sits is specific. Millennial women averaged $643,700, and Gen Z women spent more than twice what men their age did. Among Gen X and boomer collectors, men outspent women. The highest spending of any market came from Mainland China, “driven primarily by women whose averages were over twice that of men” (Arts Economics and UBS, 2025). Women were also slightly more common in the top wealth band: 10% of women respondents held more than $50 million, against 7% of men.

The sample has its own shape. Respondents were surveyed in July and August 2025, held over $1 million excluding property and business assets, and had spent more than $10,000 on art and antiques in each of 2023 and 2024. Their average age was 38, and boomers made up only 1% of the sample, so the figures describe younger wealth more than long-held collections.

The direction of travel is not in doubt. UBS writes in the survey’s foreword that women “now control over a third of global wealth”. In the United States alone, Cerulli Associates expects $54 trillion to pass between spouses through 2048, more than 95% of it to women (Cerulli Associates, 2025). For a dealer the practical reading is narrow and useful: look at the top twenty accounts and count how many of the decisions were hers.

Aware of the risk, and buying anyway

The survey asked collectors how risky it was to buy work by a completely unknown artist. Fifty-two percent called it high or very high risk, and the answers differed little by gender (Arts Economics and UBS, 2025). Behavior differed a great deal. Among respondents who rated it high or very high risk, 69% of women still did it frequently or often, against 56% of men, and men were twice as likely never to have done it (10% against 5%).

The same openness showed up elsewhere. Sixty-nine percent of women had bought an artist they discovered for the first time in 2024 or 2025, against 63% of men. More women than men thought it risky to admit in public that their taste differed from their peers’ (48% against 41%), yet 56% of women said they did so frequently or often, against 46% of men.

The money tells a quieter story. Women put 36% of their spending into new and emerging artists and men 34%, most of the difference coming from brand-new names (18% against 16%). Men put 46% into established or top-tier artists, women 42%. The frequency gap is large and the spending gap on emerging work is small, which suggests many of her first purchases of an unknown name are modest ones. The survey also found collectors of both genders “highly sensitive to losses” in art-market scenarios, “with women being more loss-avoidant than men”. Men were more likely to research on their own before buying. Women were slightly more likely to take outside guidance.

Put together, the profile is precise. She sees the risk as clearly as he does, acts on it more often, and leans slightly more on outside guidance. She does not need to be persuaded that the risk is small. She needs a reason to take it.

Her taste runs ahead of the resale record

Women collectors reported that 49% of the works in their collections were by women artists, close to parity, against 40% in men’s collections. Across all respondents the share was 44%, up from 33% in 2018. Women also gave 47% of their spending to women artists, against 41% for men, and the gap held in every generation. It was widest among boomers, a small group in this sample, where women gave a 10% higher share than men, and it was still 6% among Gen Z (Arts Economics and UBS, 2025). In the US, the share in women’s collections reached 55%.

The primary market has moved toward that taste. Across galleries, women were 45% of the artists represented in 2025, and galleries working only in the primary market reached parity, with women artists generating 44% of their sales by value (Arts Economics, 2026). The resale market has not followed. Art by women made up around 3.3% of global auction sales between 2008 and mid-2022, $6.2 billion out of $187 billion (Burns and Halperin, 2022). In 2025, women were 11% of the top 200 artists across fine art auctions and 8% of their sales value. Five names, Joan Mitchell, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Marlene Dumas and Cecily Brown, accounted for 54% of the value of the women among the top 200 Postwar and Contemporary artists (Arts Economics, 2026).

The dealers’ report reads the drop from small galleries to large ones as a career problem: more women artists now enter the market at the lower end, where most of the gains were concentrated, and few advance to the most commercially successful tiers. For the smaller gallery holding those artists, the consequence is practical. When she looks at a woman artist early in a career, there is usually no auction trail to consult, and the trail that exists belongs to a handful of stars. Whatever reassures her has to come from the gallery.

She does not need to be persuaded that the risk is small. She needs a reason to take it.

That reason is a file. It holds a dated exhibition history, every price the gallery has asked and achieved for the artist with its date, which is a price history no database holds, and the institutions and publications that have taken the work. It also includes the studio. Women attended more museum and gallery exhibitions than men and were more likely to visit an artist’s studio (Arts Economics and UBS, 2025), so the visit belongs in the plan from the start. None of this is investment advice: a documented history lowers uncertainty and promises nothing about resale value.

Address the buyer who decides

Seventy percent of the collectors surveyed made final purchase decisions jointly, with a spouse or partner or with an expert such as a dealer or adviser (Arts Economics and UBS, 2025). Women were more likely than men to decide with a partner (40% against 35%), and the men who consulted a partner were the likelier to keep the final say. Couples also disagree: 52% of women said they disagreed with their spouse or partner over which works to buy frequently or often, against 42% of men.

A household is often two collections sharing one set of walls. A client record that files the couple under a single name loses the taste that actually chose the work, and the next invitation goes to the wrong person.

Her channels favor the gallery. Women put 44% of their spending through dealers against 41% for men, including a higher share at art fairs, 22% directly through artists against 19%, and 10% at auction against 14% (Arts Economics and UBS, 2025). They also went to more events: 55 in 2024, ten more than men, and 52 attended or planned for 2025 against 44. She is in the room more often than he is. The invitation, the invoice, the certificate and the follow-up note should carry her name and speak to what she chose.

New buyers are half the list, so count who they are

Dealers’ own figures add urgency. Just under half (49%) of the buyers dealers sold to in 2025 were new to their business, up from 44% in 2024, and for galleries with turnover under $250,000 the figure was 60% (Arts Economics, 2026). New buyers brought 38% of sales by value on a simple average across businesses, and 26% once weighted by the value of each business’s sales, on which basis clients of more than five years held 45%. The average number of buyers per dealer fell to 57, from 72 the year before. The report names turning new buyers into repeat buyers as a critical success factor.

Neither report records the gender of a gallery’s new buyers. Only the gallery can. Given what the survey shows about who buys unknown artists, a gallery with emerging artists has reason to expect many first-time buyers to be women, and should check its own records rather than assume. The fields are simple: who chose the work, how she arrived (fair, exhibition, studio visit, referral, Instagram), what she bought first and at what price, whether the artist was a woman, and whether a second purchase followed within a year. Four quarters of that data will tell a gallery more about its future than any survey.