She’s a Louvre-r, not a fighter. Sara Friedlander is the deputy chairman of post-war and contemporary art at thee Christie’s, so she basically spends all day surrounded by world-renowned artwork and millionaires waiting to buy it.

We asked the 38-year-old what sparked her interest in the industry, how female artists are finally getting the spotlight, and why the best burgeoning artworks are decades old.

So, what’s your job?
I would say I have 2 jobs. The first is to read the temperature of the market, while simultaneously telling the market what something is worth. That means I am 50% merchant, 50% specialist. On my best days, I’m an expert who advises people on acquisitions and deaccessions within their collections. My area of expertise is from 1950 to today.

You’re living every art history major’s dream. How did you land at Christie’s?
As a gender studies and art history major, I thought I wanted to go into academia. But I had this professor who was like, “You don’t want to go into academia. You want to sell things.” [Sell] is kind of a dirty word in my business, but I said, “Maybe you’re right,” and took the first job I could get at Christie’s as an assistant. I’ve now been [here] for 14 years. Your title changes as you climb up the ladder, but the passion for the work is the same. Maybe the paintings become more expensive, but the gig is still connecting someone to something they feel they can’t live without.

How do you determine how much a piece is worth?
I’m going to use Joan Mitchell as an example because she has been undervalued for so long, along with so many female abstract expressionists. Collectors buying works from that [mid-1900s] time period feel it’s been undervalued, so we price it based on what we think the market can bear. [It’s a] secret sauce between an estimate that encourages people to bid and compete, and a barometer of where we think it’s going to sell at. Sometimes that means looking at things that have sold previously, but sometimes you have to tell the market, “This is what it’s worth right now.”

Do you constantly have to advocate for women’s work?
It’s such a pain in the a*s, because when I was [a student], I saw the insanely unequal, nonsensical way in which women artists of the same generation—who studied under the same professors, who were at the same galleries—were performing on the secondary market. The cool thing about what I do is I can rewrite history from a market perspective. Unfortunately, a lot of these artists are not alive to see these results, but at least I can solve that history problem. We are still so far behind from where we need to be, but people are starting to pay attention.

What specific artists have you advocated for?
Alice Neel. I studied under Pam Allara, who wrote the first biography on Alice Neel, and I was so honored to sell a world-record prize for her painting 6 months ago, which was timed exactly with the Alice Neel retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a really exciting moment where I felt like, “Okay, people are finally going to pay attention to her, both on the curatorial level and in the market as well.”

What’s your favorite piece of art?
Right now, I’m living with a painting by a young artist named Jenna Gribbon, and I really dig her work. [The piece] is a figurative subject of her girlfriend. It’s super sexy and complicated and everything art should be.

Which contemporary artists should be on our radar?
Just go to David Lewis gallery or Andrew Kreps and see what [they] have on their walls. But I’m equally interested in artists whose markets are up-and-coming, even if they aren’t making art anymore. Artists like Grace Hartigan, an ambitious painter active from the ‘50s through the ‘90s who mastered abstraction and figuration. Sometimes you have to dig into the history books to discover what’s new.