A woman contemplates an oil painting "Un jardin pour audrey" (1974) by Joan Mitchell during the exhibition "Mitchell-Riopelle, Nothing in moderation" (Un couple dans la demesure) in the Fonds Helene et Edouard Leclerc in Landerneau, western France, last December. AFP/Getty Images Repeat auction sales of art tracked by Sotheby’s Mei Moses unit in the last six years show prices for works by female artists have risen dramatically faster than works by men. Sotheby’s Mei Moses’s All Art-Female index rose by 72.9% between 2012 and 2018. In other words, “a work by a female artist bought in 2012 would, on average, be worth 72.9% more if sold in 2018,” the firm said in a report released by Art Agency, Partners, Thursday morning. The All Art-Male index rose by only 8.3% in the same time frame. That’s a drastically different result than the previous 50 years, when repeat sales of both male and female artists moved roughly in tandem, says Michael Klein, head of Sotheby’s Mei Moses, a firm that tracks the art market through repeat auction sales of more than 63,000 objects. In the past 50 years, “gender didn’t make a difference, but what we’re seeing in the past couple of years, is apparently it has,” Klein says. “It was fascinating to see the uptick on top of the fact that things have been the same for so long.” The inside story, in 15 minutes.Listen to how a Barron’s story came together to expose the forces that shape investing today––and how this impacts your portfolio––with our podcast, The Readback. A new story, every week–– listen in iTunes now. Despite the acceleration in repeat sales of works by women, the proportion of works by female artists and male artists sold at auction hasn’t changed much over the last 10 years. Of global auction sales in 2018, art by women represented only 8% of total lots sold compared with a 6% share in 2008, according to The Art Market 2019, a report written by the Ireland-based firm Art Economics for Art Basel and UBS. The report also points to a 2017 academic study that shows a…