Orchestras hid players behind screens to hire more women

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.

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.

They stopped fixing judges and fixed what judges could see: the candidate played behind a screen, so only the performance reached the jury.

The screen physically removed gender from the jury's perception at the moment of judgment.

Because adoption was staggered, the same orchestras and repertoire could be compared with and without the screen.

With only the performance audible, the jury's decision stopped reflecting their associations and started reflecting actual skill.

The change was structural, not persuasive, so it couldn't be undermined by unexamined bias.

To counter bias, don't train evaluators—redesign the evaluation so the irrelevant trait never reaches them.

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. 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.