Welcome to the inner circle? Earnings and inequality in the creative industries

Do women and workers with a migration background earn relatively less in the core creative arts or in commercial creative sectors such as advertising? In this paper, we seek to (1) uncover to what extent workers’ socio-demographic characteristics and the sub-sector of the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) in which they are active affect how much they earn, and (2) unravel to what extent the context of sub-sectors affects inequality in earnings between different socio-demographic groups. Using Statistics Netherlands register data on all workers with earnings from the CCIs, we show that earnings are lowest in the sub-sectors in Throsby’s (Citation2008) inner circles of the CCIs. Both having a migration background and being a woman affect earnings in the CCIs. Especially gender inequality in earnings is extensive and omnipresent, being least pronounced in sub-sectors such as literature, music and visual arts, and most severe in e.g. film and photography.