Discrimination against Women in Symphony Orchestras
FIBRDiscrimination against women has been alleged in hiring practices for many occupations, but it is extremely difficult to demonstrate sex-biased hiring. A change the way symphony orchestras musicians provides an unusual way to test for sex-biased hiring. To overcome possible biases in hiring, most orchestras their audition policies in the 1970s and 1980s. A major change involved the use of 'blind' auditions with a 'screen' to 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 by 50% the probability a woman will be out of certain preliminary rounds.
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