Women Are Running the World’s Great Museums Into The Ground

Qualified women should certainly take their place at the top if they are the best candidates for the job...but that’s not what’s happening.

Thom Nickels | July 25, 2026

In 2023, the New York Times ran an article entitled, “Increasingly, Women Are Running the World’s Great Museums.” Some of the museums mentioned were the Louvre, the Vatican Museum, and the National Gallery of Art.

But it’s not only museums where women dominate. Other arts and cultural institutions seem to be on a permanent trajectory to hire women as CEOs. On the surface, this shouldn’t be a problem. Qualified women should certainly take their place at the top if they are the best candidates for the job.

There seems to be a troubling common denominator here. The vast majority of the women in these positions fit a certain mold. They come pre-stamped and processed. They are monochrome, feminist, left-leaning women schooled in the progressive agenda.

That agenda might be summed up this way: they are the products of left-leaning universities where life is seen through a lens of oppressor and the oppressed. Feminist and gender ideology is also a big part of the mix, and so suddenly you have heretofore great cultural institutions like the Athenaeum of Philadelphia bowing before the latest left-wing craze to come down the pike.

The Athenaeum used to be a unique place. Once an institution of great cultural impact, it has now been “democratized” in a weedy grassroots way — thanks to the death of many of the classically educated old white men on the board and the institution’s........

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