Did you know that after they switched to blind auditions, major symphony orchestras hired women between 30% to 55% more? Before bringing in “blind auditions” with a screen to conceal the the candidate, women in the top 5 major orchestras made up less than 5% of the musicians performing.
so I believe it was actually more complicated than that, in interesting ways. Because at first, when they did blind auditions, they were STILL hiring more men.
…Then they put down a carpet, so that high heels didn’t clack on the floor, and BOOM women were suddenly getting hired.
The testers didn’t even know that’s what they were picking up on, which just goes to show how tiny of a cue it takes for misogyny to kick in.
The case of blind auditions for orchestras and how it dramatically changed the gender makeup of orchestras is a very illuminating example of gender bias, and an interesting possible way of countering it.
You can be sexist without knowing it. You can be racist without knowing it. This is not a moral failing; it is a moral imperative to remember that you are fallible, and take steps to limit the damage your squishy ape brain’s foibles can cause.
The final chapter in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (2005) describes this in detail.
What you don’t usually hear about when discussing this blind audition process is that after the blind auditions were implemented, when women had gotten many positions in the orchestra, men no longer saw being a member as prestigious and the salaries for the entire orchestra dropped.
That happens in basically any field the moment women start to show up. The most famous examples are: teaching, which lost prestige and absolute pay when it became “women’s work”; certain scientific fields, especially in biology, which has lost prestige and is now considered a “soft science” because women became biologists en masse; and in Russia, medical doctors no longer enjoy the high status they still have in the West, because in Russia a lot of women became doctors.
In the other direction, when men en masse join a field that was previously primarily women, the pay and prestige both rise. The most famous example is computer programming.
