#881 1979 · Major US symphony orchestras · Classical music

American orchestras kept hiring almost no women — until they hid the player from the jury

the problem

Women held a tiny fraction of major orchestra seats, and the field insisted the audition, heard face to face, proved it

background

Through the 1970s, women made up only a few percent of the players in America's leading symphony orchestras. Auditions were held face to face: the jury saw who walked in, and the prevailing explanation in the field was that women simply did not play well enough. There was almost no way to test that claim — the hiring process itself was the only record, and it pointed whichever way the jury's judgment pointed.

Starting in the late 1970s, orchestras began changing the audition one at a time and at different moments: a physical screen was set up between the candidate and the jury so the player could be heard but not seen. The staggered adoption, documented by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse, later gave economists a rare natural experiment — the same orchestras, the same repertoire, before and after the screen went up.

what everyone would do

Treat it as an attitude problem: tell juries to be fair, run bias training, exhort conductors to give women a chance. It fails because the bias in question does not announce itself as prejudice — the jury hears a performer and genuinely believes it is judging only the playing, while identity is already inside the judgment before the first note.

what they saw

They stopped trying to fix the judges and fixed what the judges could see. You can't instruct impartiality, but you can build a room where the only signal reaching the jury is the performance itself.

the move

The orchestras did not lecture the juries, retrain them, or set hiring targets. They changed what the jury could perceive: the candidate played behind a screen so the judges heard the playing without seeing the player. The evaluation was rebuilt so that the only information reaching the decision-makers was the performance itself.

why it works

A screen is cheaper than persuasion and cannot be talked out of: it physically removes gender, appearance and reputation from the evidence set at the exact moment of judgment. Because each orchestra adopted it at a different time, the same players and the same repertoire pass through identical juries with and without the screen — and the only thing that changed is what the jury could see. The result is that evaluation stops measuring the evaluator's associations and starts measuring the one thing the audition exists for.

the payoff

A screen raised a woman's odds of advancing ~50% and of winning finals severalfold, and drove the rise in women's share of orchestra seats.

where it breaks

The screen only works while the masked trait is genuinely irrelevant to the job being judged — blind the evaluation where the hidden attribute matters and you degrade the decision instead of purifying it. It also depends on the hidden identity being concealable at all: a voice, a name, a familiar style can leak through the mask. And it fixes the moment of evaluation, not the pipeline feeding it — if women are not reaching the audition at all, no screen changes the outcome.

what came after

The study (American Economic Review, 2000) became one of the most cited demonstrations that anonymising an evaluation — not arguing with the evaluators — changes who passes it. Blind auditions are now standard in orchestras, and the move is explicitly borrowed as a model elsewhere, from hiring to academic medicine.

references

[1]Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of 'Blind' Auditions on Female MusiciansAmerican Economic Review (American Economic Association), 2000aeaweb.org
[2]Scientific background to the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences 2023 (documents the audition reform and its effects)The Nobel Foundation, 2023nobelprize.org
[3]Orchestrating Impartiality — NBER Working Paper 5903National Bureau of Economic Research, 1997nber.org