Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of “Blind” Auditions on Female Musicians

By Claudia Goldin, Cecilia E. Rouse. 2000

1,667 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Discrimination against women has been alleged in hiring practices for many occupations, but it is extremely difficult to demonstrate sex-biased hiring. A change in the way symphony orchestras recruit musicians provides an unusual way to test for sex-biased hiring. To overcome possible biases in hiring, most orchestras revised their audition policies in the 1970s and 1980s. A major change involved the use of blind' auditions with a screen' to conceal the identity of the candidate from the jury. Female musicians in the top five symphony orchestras in the United States were less than 5% of all players in 1970 but are 25% today. We ask whether women were more likely to be advanced and/or hired with the use of blind' auditions. Using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed-effects framework, we find that the screen increases by 50% the probability a woman will be advanced out of certain preliminary rounds. The screen also enhances, by severalfold, the likelihood a female contestant will be the winner in the final round. Using data on orchestra personnel, the switch to blind' auditions can explain between 30% and 55% of the increase in the proportion female among new hires and between 25% and 46% of the increase in the percentage female in the orchestras since 1970.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

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Citations in the corpus

Ethnic Discrimination in Germany’s Labour Market: A Field Experiment (2012, background): “Further, there are only few vacancies from East Germany since most large corporations have their headquarters in West Germany.”
Developing the Research Basis for Controlling Bias in Hiring (2012, background): “• Leading symphony orchestras auditioning musicians behind screens so that judges could not see the applicants hired more women players than those conducting auditions in the open (Golden & Rouse, 2000).”
Field experiments in labor economics (2010, background): “One such study is the ingenuous paper of Goldin and Rouse (2000), who use audition notes from a series of auditions among national orchestras in order to determine whether or not blind auditions—those in which musicians auditioned behind a screen—help women relatively more than men.”
The Matilda Effect in Science Communication (2013, background): “Similar experimental evidence also emerged beyond a science context (e.g., for hiring of musicians; Goldin & Rouse, 2000), evaluation of work teams (Heilman & Haynes, 2005), as well as leadership perceptions (Eagly & Karau, 2002).”