Orchestras have adopted blind auditions to eliminate bias based on gender and ethnicity, resulting in an increase in female musicians from less than 5% in 1970 to 25% in 1997. Some orchestras go further by masking sounds of women’s footwear and using blind auditions throughout the process. Female musicians now outnumber male counterparts in some orchestras.
In recent decades, orchestras have changed the way they hire musicians and have begun to uproot a long-standing prejudice that had kept women and minorities from accessing opportunities in the industry. Since the mid-1970s, musicians have performed in preliminary rounds of auditions from behind a screen, so factors such as gender and ethnicity are not taken into consideration. With “blind auditions” becoming the norm, the percentage of female musicians in the top five orchestras in the United States increased from less than 5 percent in 1970 to 25 percent in 1997.
Listening without seeing:
Today the gender gap is even smaller. In the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, for example, female musicians outnumber their male counterparts, 51 to 45.
In some orchestras, blind auditions are only used to narrow down the field, which has made it 50 percent more likely that a woman will advance to the final round. Other hearing processes are completely “blind”.
Some orchestras even attempt to mask the characteristic sounds of women’s footwear by providing a strip of carpet to walk on or by asking candidates to remove their shoes before taking the stage.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
