Opening doors through education.
Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of “Blind” Auditions on Female Musicians. Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse (2000). The American Economic Review, Vol. 90, No. 4, pp. 715-741.
Goldin and Rouse examined whether female musicians auditioning for the nation’s leading symphony orchestras fared better in the hiring competition when their sex was not known to the judges. In the 1970s and 80s, many top orchestras gradually introduced “blind” auditions, using screens to prevent judges from seeing the candidates. Goldin and Rouse concluded that the blind procedure, under which only quality of sound could be evaluated, accounted for as much as a 25 percent increase in female hires. The blind method increased the likelihood that a woman would make it past the preliminary round of the audition as well as become the winner in the final round.
The take-home message? Gatekeepers’ biases, whether conscious and explicit or, as perhaps more likely for these orchestras’ officials, unconscious, unintentional, and implicit, can limit opportunities for certain groups of people. Changing institutional structures can sometimes ameliorate such effects.