In April of this year the British Journal of Photography (BJP) published a ‘Women Only’ issue featuring women photographers, projects run by women and conversations about the paucity of women in photography. It touched lightly on the reasons behind this disparity and briefly, in an almost embarrassed tone, highlighted the magazine’s own past sexism, showing some of the easier to digest sexualised advertising that had filled its pages in the past. But why now? The role of women in photography has become a vital issue once again, tallying with wider public discussions about women’s involvement in other arenas. A conference at the Tate Gallery Fast Forward: Women and Photography then and now has also taken place this year (part of a larger research project at the University College of the Arts, Farnham). Other initiatives include Firecracker, the European women photographers project, started by Fiona Rogers, a Magnum employee, to showcase women’s work. As was highlighted in Source 76 women now make up a majority of the photography curators in Ireland and the UK (62%). Graduating photography students are now more likely to be women than men, but are these moves beyond equal participation reflected in the wider photographic culture? Are questions around gender in photography redundant?
 To get some answers to these questions we have surveyed the programmes of a selection of photography institutions to find out the historical and contemporary participation of women photographers. These include the magazines Creative Camera and the BJP, the galleries Belfast Exposed, Impressions, Open Eye, the Photographers’ Gallery and Gallery of Photography. The available information – either supplied by the galleries or taken from library collections of magazines – covers the period from 1970 onwards (depending on the history of the organisation). Taken by decade, in the 1970s women made up 18% of the photographers published in Creative Camera, 13% of the exhibition programmes of the galleries and just 8% of the work published in the BJP. Since the 1970s things have improved but are still well short of parity. In the last four and a half years women have made up only 30% of the exhibitions in the galleries and, notwithstanding their ‘Women Only’ issue, 28% of the work in the BJP. Creative Camera and the BJP make useful case studies as they have both been influential publications throughout this period in British photographic history and represent different sectors of the photography industry. Creative Camera was identified as the ‘independent’ and therefore more progressive forum for photography in the UK. In the 1980s 22% of its portfolio pages were made up of work by women, a gradual increase on the previous decade. Moving on from Creative Camera to the BJP – long established as an industry magazine, for commercial professionals and technically proficient amateurs – it becomes clear how radical Creative Camera was. It is immediately apparent that the BJP of the 80s was for male audiences. Women were regularly 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 % 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s Women Men Percentage of women in exhibition programmes from 1970s – 2010s 11