Pros
As has already been addressed in many of the reviews here, artnet has a fraught corporate culture, chiefly due to its awkward position as a family-run, publicly-owned company. It is perhaps unsurprising that many offenses against women have gained little notice, as most of these are laughed off or simply ignored by artnet’s male-dominated senior leadership.
Cons
Throughout my time at artnet, I witnessed and heard many accounts of harassment by senior team members: a man who would touch one colleague’s legs to ascertain if she was wearing stockings that day; the announcement to the team that a woman was fired because she “hit the glass ceiling”; a man who loudly watched porn in his office during work hours for many to hear; one woman who was told by another that there were too many women in the company, and entirely too much estrogen; another woman who was oinked at by a male colleague while she ate her lunch at her desk. It is easy to discount these events as the actions committed by a few bad eggs, or perhaps the lingering attitude of an old guard, as has been artnet’s perennial stance. And while it is unsettling to be referred to by your hair color rather than by name, or to be greeted as “the girls” when you walk into a meeting, what is even more threatening about the culture at artnet is the frequent dismissal and sheer underestimation of the women who comprise the vast majority of its workforce. If you wish to work in an environment where inexperienced male coworkers will be sought out for guidance and advice in lieu of their female supervisors, where in a room of male peers you alone will be asked to take notes, or where your best chances of advancement are your looks (and yet be flatly told by leadership that there is no gender disparity problem), then perhaps artnet is the right place for you.