Three Dutch museums – the Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Museum Arnhem and the Fries Museum – have introduced quotas for women artists, the Volkskrant said on Friday.

The paper approached 28 museums and asked them about their policies for buying and displaying works by female artists.

In addition, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is one of three museums working to improve the balance between male and female artists in its collection, without having made this a concrete aim, the paper said.

‘We now have a policy of spending half our budget for new purchases on art by women artists,’ Charles Esche of the Van Abbemuseum told the paper. ‘If you strive for balance in numbers but not in money, men still get the lion’s share.’

Arnhem’s modern art museum has had a similar strategy since 1982.

Museums focusing on old rather than modern art find it more difficult to improve their balance, the paper said.

Lisa Smit of the Van Gogh museum said her team is constantly on the look out to buy work by women Impressionists but that these are very hard to come by.