Did you know that after they switched to blind auditions, major symphony orchestras hired women between 30% to 55% more? Before bringing in āblind auditionsā 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.
ā¦Then they put down a carpet, so that high heels didnāt clack on the floor,Ā and BOOM women were suddenly getting hired.
The testers didnāt even know thatās 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 brainās foibles can cause.
The final chapter in Malcolm Gladwellās Blink (2005) describes this in detail.
What you donāt 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.
Ya. This is the fundamental problem with trying to do womenās liberation and equality under capitalism. If you actually enable women to achieve parity with men in jobs from which women had been barred or relegated to lower standing, then you incidentally double the potential labor pool for that job and destroyed its social value because of how market logic works.
The rule of capital is thus easily able to give the appearence that womenās liberation is itself anti-worker when we do not see the role of the choice to use the labor commodity market system in producing the observed outcomes.
Having ceased to deny women to join orchestras ought to mean we have twice as many concerts to go to, not that performers see their lifestyle diminish from price inflation and stagnant wages.
Having ceased to deny women to join orchestras ought to mean we have twice as many concerts to go to, not that performers see their lifestyle diminish from price inflation and stagnant wages.
Why would people want twice as many orchestra concerts just because the hiring pool for orchestra performers got larger?
My understanding is that thereās a lot more aspiring professional musicians than there are crowds of people who care enough about music to want to go to a concert hall and pay a fee that covers costs like building maintenance and living wages for performers.
Even if we imagine allocating all monetary resources in a way that promotes human welfare, I donāt think having more orchestras would be something weād prioritize, because for most humans, listening to recorded music is about as good and much, much cheaper.
Hypothetically if the added worker-consumers desire concerts as much as old consumers and previously didnāt generally have resources to pay for them, doubling the workforce would result in doubling the demand for concerts.
Lots of people still spend a Lot of their money on live music events.
Lots of people want to see their favorite bands and singers. This is not the same as wanting to see orchestras, something I pretty much never hear about anyone wanting to do.
