For most UK museums, a higher education qualification was almost always included in the selection criteria for new staff openings, even for low-wage, indoor and retail positions.
But museums are increasingly opening up their hiring criteria to applicants who haven’t gone to college, thanks in part to pressure from an online campaign called Fair Museum Jobs, co-founded by curator Tom Hopkins. Royal Air Force. Museum in London, and Louise McAward-White, recipient of the Museums Association Benevolent Fund. In May, McAward-White will be the keynote speaker at the first workshop of the Making Museum Professionals conference, Museum Work: Hierarchies and Barriers, Exclusion and Inclusion at Birkbeck, University of London.
Together they founded Fair Museum Jobs in 2018 to address “the sorry state of recruitment and employment in the sector”.
The organization uses ‘keyboard warrior’ tactics to expose unfair recruitment practices at major UK museums, including salary cover-ups (where salary details in job advertisements are not disclosed ), degrees and unreasonable qualification criteria for entry-level positions.
Fair Museum Jobs calls degrees “a major barrier to fairness, inclusion and diversity in our industry,” noting that it has become common practice to require a degree or “equivalent experience,” with little justification, which means many candidates are put off applying. University degrees, given the cost of access to higher education in the UK, are not available to everyone.
The group has also hit out at museums for advertising low-wage positions. In February, it took Twitter to highlight a kiosk assistant position at the Imperial War Museums advertised at £9.00 an hour, below the statutory national minimum wage. The Imperial War Museums responded that there was “an administrative error” in the listing and adjusted the listing to £9.90 an hour, still £1.00 less than the actual living wage of 10.90 £ per hour.
That said, Fair Museum Jobs is also keen to champion examples of good practice, having recently highlighted an advert from Historic Royal Palaces for a position as Conservator of Historic Buildings, with no post-graduate degree required.
The group also focused on the widespread practice of salary camouflage, which Hopkins says allows museum employers to perpetuate pay inequalities and discriminatory practices. When a job’s pay scale is hidden or portrayed as ‘experience-dependent’ or ‘competitive’, ‘it’s not only wasteful for candidates, it’s damaging to the diversity of the sector, the equality, fairness and employee well-being,” says Hopkins. . This amounts, he adds, to gatekeeping, the practice of ensuring that only the privileged classes have access to the best jobs in museums.
“No one has come up with a good reason to justify the salary cover-up,” Hopkins says. “We think the real motivation may be that it allows many organizations to pay as little as possible.”
Although some museums have been receptive to the campaign, the group wants to go further. “We would like to see wage concealment legislated against at the national level,” Hopkins said. “Until we get that – and it’s probably a long way off – we’d like to increase our message about how pernicious it is. It is often such a realization that the level of opprobrium raised against its appearance is such that no museum will attempt it for its size.
