Calling out unfair recruitment practices at cultural institutions

This article was first published by The Art Newspaper.

For most UK museums, a higher education qualification was almost always included in the selection criteria for new staff openings—even for low-paid, front-of-house and retail positions.

But museums are increasingly opening their job criteria up to candidates who did not go to university, in part thanks to the pressure exerted by an online campaign called Fair Museum Jobs, which is co-founded by Tom Hopkins, a curator at the Royal Air Force Museum in London, and Louise McAward-White, a recipient of the Museums Association Benevolent Fund. In May, McAward-White will be a keynote speaker at the conference Making Museum Professionals’ first workshop, Museum Work: Hierarchies and Barriers, Exclusion and Inclusion at Birkbeck, University of London.

Together, they founded Fair Museum Jobs in 2018 to raise concerns about “the terrible state of recruitment and employment in the sector”.

The organisation uses “keyboard warrior” tactics to call out unfair recruitment practices at leading museums in the UK, including salary cloaking (where salary details in job advertisements are not disclosed), credentialism and unreasonable qualification criteria for entry-level positions.

@UK_ICOM