First ever census data on transgender and non-binary artists and workers in the arts, culture, and heritage

Representation is very high among artists

Happy Pride Month everyone.

Today’s post examines the representation of transgender and non-binary individuals within 4 broad groupings of occupations: artists, arts leaders, workers in cultural occupations, and all Canadian workers, based on data from the 2021 census.

For details about the occupation groups included in each of these broad categories, please see my post from May.

June is “free month”. Thanks to my paid subscribers, all four posts this month have been free. If you’d like to join them — and support vital research into the arts, you can do so here.

This is the first post using data from the custom request that I received on June 16 (which I had submitted to Statistics Canada 6 months and 1 day earlier).

I had to receive special approval of my request for information about transgender and non-binary workers in the arts, culture, and heritage. It appears that Statistics Canada is being extra careful not to identify any transgender and non-binary census respondents.

I should note that overarching data on all LGBTQ2SIA+ workers are not available from the census. Statistics Canada has never included a question about sexual orientation in the census. For this reason, no data are available on lesbian, gay, bisexual, or asexual Canadians.

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Census questions and population level findings

The data in this post are based on census questions about sex at birth and current gender (as of May 11, 2021). The questions are:

What was this person's sex at birth?

Sex refers to sex assigned at birth.

• Male

• Female

3. What is this person's gender?

Refers to current gender which may be different from sex assigned at birth and may be different from what is indicated on legal documents.

• Male

• Female

• Or please specify this person's gender

Statistics Canada explained its transgender and non-binary groupings as follows: “For many people, their gender corresponds to their sex at birth (cisgender men and cisgender women). For some, these do not align (transgender men and transgender women) or their gender is not exclusively ‘man’ or ‘woman’ (non-binary people).”

Statistics Canada found that there were about 101,000 people who self-identified as transgender or non-binary in May 2021, including 59,460 people “aged 15 and older living in a private household who were transgender (0.19%) and 41,355 who were non-binary (0.14%). Together, they represented 1 in 300 people, or 0.33% of the population aged 15 and older.”

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Transgender and non-binary artists, cultural workers, and arts leaders

In the arts, according to the census:

• 2,500 transgender and non-binary people work as artists, including 800 transgender and 1,700 non-binary people.

• 7,400 transgender and non-binary Canadians work in occupations in the arts, culture, and heritage, including 2,700 transgender and 4,700 non-binary people.

• 510 transgender and non-binary people work in one of five arts leadership occupations, including 130 transgender and 380 non-binary people.

• 73,800 transgender and non-binary Canadians have an occupation, including 40,400 transgender and 33,400 non-binary people.

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Transgender and non-binary people gravitate to artist occupations

Artists represent 1.9% of all transgender people and a remarkable 5.1% of all non-binary people in the Canadian labour force. Both of these percentages are much higher than those for cisgender women (1.1%) and cisgender men (0.9%), as shown in the graph below.

Examined differently, this means that:

• 1 in every 20 non-binary people who work is an artist.

• 1 in every 51 transgender people who work is an artist.

• 1 in every 92 cisgender women who work is an artist.

• 1 in every 115 cisgender men who work is an artist.

Because of the sensitivity over releasing census data on transgender and non-binary workers, I did not request separate data on transgender women and transgender men, nor did I ask for statistics on transgender and non-binary people in each of the 10 artist occupations.

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Representation of transgender and non-binary people in arts, culture, and heritage occupations

As shown in the graph below, transgender people represent a higher proportion of artists (0.39%) than arts leaders (0.23%), all workers in cultural occupations (0.30%), and workers in all occupations (0.20%).

Similarly, non-binary Canadians represent a higher proportion of all artists (0.84%) than arts leaders (0.67%), all workers in cultural occupations (0.51%), and workers in all occupations (0.16%).

Combined, transgender and non-binary Canadians represent 1.22% of artists, 0.90% of arts leaders, 0.81% of workers in cultural occupations, and 0.36% of workers in all occupations.

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Other arts surveys found higher proportions of gender diverse workers

Two other recent surveys in the arts included a non-binary view of gender. Both reported higher proportions of gender diverse respondents than the census.

The Canadian Artists and Content Creators Economic Survey, fielded close to the same time as the 2021 census (May through July of 2021), asked whether people self-identified as belonging to one or more of “equity-deserving groups” that were listed in the survey. 7.1% of the survey’s 4,747 respondents selected the option “gender-diverse communities”, and 21.3% self-identified as belonging to “LGBTQ2S+ communities”. This survey, with a very different question related to gender diversity than the census, had a much higher proportion of gender diverse respondents than the census count of transgender and non-binary artists (7.1% vs. 1.2%).

The Individual Report of the National Arts and Culture Impact Survey, which was conducted in the fall of 2020, found that 2% of the 1,273 respondents identified their gender as “other”, rather than “woman” or “man”. Once again, this estimate was higher than the census count (1.2% of artists being transgender or non-binary).

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Arts, culture, and heritage occupations in the census

Statistics Canada’s full occupation titles for the 10 occupation groups included as artists are:

• Actors, comedians, and circus performers

• Artisans and craftspersons

• Authors and writers (excluding technical writers)

• Conductors, composers, and arrangers

• Dancers

• Musicians and singers

• Other performers (including buskers, DJs, puppeteers, face painters, erotic dancers, and many other entertainers)

• Painters, sculptors, and other visual artists

• Photographers

• Producers, directors, choreographers, and related occupations

The five arts leadership occupations are:

• Conductors, composers, and arrangers

• Conservators and curators

• Library, archive, museum, and art gallery managers

• Managers in publishing, motion pictures, broadcasting, and the performing arts

• Producers, directors, choreographers, and related occupations

Two of the arts leadership occupations (conductors etc. and producers etc.) are also included as artists. As such, the number of arts leadership workers should not be added to the number of artists.

The statistics on workers in arts, culture, and heritage occupations include people who work in 52 occupation groups, including:

• Heritage occupations such as librarians, curators, and archivists

• Cultural occupations such as graphic designers, print operators, editors, translators, architects, and professionals in fundraising, advertising, marketing, and public relations

• The 10 artist occupations

The occupational perspective counts people who work across the economy, as long as they are classified into one of the 52 cultural occupation groups.

A list of the 52 occupation groups is available in my post from May 18, which also outlined the methods behind choosing these 52 occupation groups. In a post on April 18, I highlighted some strengths and limitations of the census for counting artists and cultural workers.

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Context: May of 2021

The pandemic context in the spring of 2021 is important to keep in mind when interpreting census data on artists, which were collected in May of 2021. I have written about that context here.