Did you know that after they switched to blind auditions, major symphony orchestras hired women between 30% to 55% more? Before bringing in “blind auditions” 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.
…Then they put down a carpet, so that high heels didn’t clack on the floor, and BOOM women were suddenly getting hired.
The testers didn’t even know that’s 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 brain’s foibles can cause.
The final chapter in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (2005) describes this in detail.
What you don’t 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.
That happens in basically any field the moment women start to show up. The most famous examples are: teaching, which lost prestige and absolute pay when it became “women’s work”; certain scientific fields, especially in biology, which has lost prestige and is now considered a “soft science” because women became biologists en masse; and in Russia, medical doctors no longer enjoy the high status they still have in the West, because in Russia a lot of women became doctors.
In the other direction, when men en masse join a field that was previously primarily women, the pay and prestige both rise. The most famous example is computer programming.
cracks knuckles Okay so as a longtime orchestra & orchestra admin veteran, here’s another dimension to this conversation to consider:
While blind auditions dramatically increased the number of women, it specifically increased the number of white women. The number of musicians of colour has not been significantly impacted by the implementation of blind auditions.
There are lots of interesting conversations going on about orchestra hiring and the audition process in general. Several things to know about orchestral auditions:
Auditions are conducted by an Audition Committee, usually the maestro and several others. The selection process for this committee is frequently vague, poorly thought out, and sometimes little more than a section popularity contest.
Audition candidates generally must pay for their own flight tickets and accommodations to audition. And since well-paying symphony jobs are few and far between, you will be traveling significant distances for many of your auditions.
Audition committees often make their decisions on candidates in under twenty seconds of playing. (This happened to a friend of mine - he was eliminated in fifteen seconds by the New York Philharmonic. He kept doggedly playing through his whole excerpt as a stubborn ‘fuck you’ because he wanted to get his money’s worth on the flight.)
The final rounds of auditions are not blind. Usually only the first and second round are.
As you can see, that process is selecting for a very specific type of person who has access to very specific resources: beta blockers (yes these are wildly common in orchestral auditions), flights, accommodations, and often specialized audition training. There are programs that literally use sports psychology principles to help you audition better, and they do not come cheap.
So obviously there’s that problem, and then there’s the problem of a Good Auditioner versus a Good Ensemble Player. A Good Auditioner often has excellent solo musicianship and is good at playing under pressure. A Good Ensemble Player is a musician who understands how to blend with their section, support the musicianship of their colleagues, and generally be a good coworker. A Good Auditioner does not a Good Ensemble Player make. Ideally you’d have both, but…that’s a big ask, and also very difficult to select for with the current audition system. Add in audition committees that are often composed of older white people, and you can see how it’s a less-than-ideal hiring practice.
Young musicians of colour frequently realize shortly after they graduate from music school that orchestras are hostile places for them. Higher levels of musicianship and professionalism are expected from you than from a white colleague of the same gender, age and socioeconomic background. You are frequently tokenized by orchestra marketing departments and are asked to do more than your fair share of (usually unpaid) promo/PR so that the orchestra can show off how ‘diverse’ they are. Microaggressions from your mostly white colleagues abound. You are often passed over for committees, extra paid playing opportunities like chamber recitals, and promotions within your section.
So the question going around in the orchestral community is this: Is auditioning as it stands still serving us well? Or should we be looking at an entirely different way to build orchestras?
Many are saying now that we should be building orchestras with inclusivity, community and equity in mind, sacrificing that minuscule edge in playing quality afforded by the audition process. Orchestras that pave the way to welcome new generations of young musicians into a space that’s not openly hostile. (For the record, the differences in musicianship between final-round audition candidates really is minuscule. Often candidates are so closely tied that there will be multiple tiebreaker audition rounds, sometimes over a period of days as the committee deliberates.)
I personally fall more in line with this thinking. I also believe that by changing the composition of orchestras, we’ll be changing the landscape of classical music - programming featuring more diverse composers from music history, as well as the living composers today whose work is extremely underrepresented.
Some further reads on this subject:
To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions http://archive.today/iH2uh (NYT article, sans paywall)
Strength in Diversity: Minorities in US Orchestras https://www.thestrad.com/playing-hub/strength-in-diversity-minorities-in-us-orchestras/13109.article
