When
we run surveys, we can sometimes derive a lot of insight from more than just
the results, but the inputs as well. And
there’s one statistic that we found perhaps more startling than any others. When
combining all of almost 30,000 respondents to our various field-wide museum
surveys, only ¼ are men.
Additionally,
looking at it from another angle, only 1/3 of women in their thirties and
forties report visiting museums often with their spouse.
Where are the men?
To
be honest . . . we don’t know and perhaps that’s the subject of another study. But this is what we do know.
While
looking at the overall picture of core visitors, only ¼ of our survey
respondents are men, the percentage
varies from survey to survey. In
both the study of outdoor history visitors and Connecticut cultural consumers, men
comprised about 1/3 of respondents. They
were ¼ of science museum respondents, and just 11% of children’s museum
respondents.
A
bit of this can be explained away by the general behaviors of men. Men are less likely than women to sign up for
e-mail newsletters, our primary vehicle for soliciting survey responses of core
visitors. Underlying this as well is
that women are still the primary driver for museum visitation in most families,
writing that membership check, and making the connection.
This
is reflected by the graph, below. Men in their thirties, as you can see, have
the lowest response rate, at only 13% of thirty-something respondents.
In contrast, 38% of respondents over seventy
were men, a response rate three times
that of men in their thirties (and this despite the fact that women over
seventy outnumber their male peers, demographically speaking).
Men
in their thirties, who are typically parents of young children, are just not
responding. And they are way outnumbered
by women at museums across the country.
The early indications from
this preliminary data is that dads have, like moms, chosen to downplay their
own needs and interests in favor of those of their children, and that when children
are very young, moms are driving museums choices. But as men age, they have more ability to
drive which museums they visit, and hence, engagement increases in a
straight-line progression with age. There
is, however, another nagging possibility that needs further exploration. Is
there an older generation of men that understand the value of museums in a way
that younger generation of men simply won’t get?
Bottom line? Just like we have a challenge to engage moms, we have a double challenge with dads: Reaching them and engaging them. Clearly, this is an area that warrants further examination as we dig deeper with future research. The gap is simply too big to ignore.
What are your thoughts? Has your museum done something that attracts men (especially younger men)? Click on “comments” below to share. (If you are reading this from your e-mail subscription to the blog, please go to our blog's website to add a comment.) Please include the name of your museum as well!
