from Hacker News

Did blind orchestra auditions benefit women?

by jsweojtj on 5/12/19, 7:32 AM with 108 comments

• by hmottestad on 5/12/19, 10:58 AM

  I did not find this very nuanced. The comments from Pallesen seem to try to advocate for extremes.

  One such comment: "Table 4 presents the first results comparing success in blind auditions vs non-blind auditions. . . . this table unambigiously shows that men are doing comparatively better in blind auditions than in non-blind auditions. The exact opposite of what is claimed."

  I had a look at the linked paper. And it is true that the table shows that women perform worse in blind auditions. However, the paper does not claim that this table shows that women perform better. Instead the paper elaborates on the options of why women perform worse by arguing the following:

  "One interpretation of this result is that the adoption of the screen lowered the average quality of female auditionees in the blind auditions. Only if we can hold quality constant can we identify the true impact of the screen."

  The paper goes on to explain how they discovered that during blind auditions there were a lot more under-qualified women and that this was skewing the data. They discovered this because they had the names of all the participants and saw that some women would participate in both blind and non-blind auditions while others would only participate in blind ones.

  The following was the papers conclusion on this matter: "When we limit the sample to those who auditioned both with and without a screen, the success rate for women competing in blind auditions is almost always higher than in those that were not blind."

• by beloch on 5/12/19, 9:20 AM

  If you're trying to justify the practice of blind auditions, it might be better to target a different prejudice. Sexism may well not be a significant factor in hiring musicians today, but it's likely that other prejudices persist. Although it would be hard to quantify, if you could show that unattractive people or people who do not dress like typical musicians do better in blind auditions to a significant degree, then you might well have justified blind auditions.

• by Jolter on 5/12/19, 11:02 AM

  Did no one follow up on this study since 2000? Presumably more blind auditions have taken place since then, and the basic problem seems to have been lack of data.

• by jl2718 on 5/12/19, 6:03 PM

  Perhaps it is a problem when the investigator’s entire career would be destroyed if they were to discover anything to contradict the zeitgeist of the field.

  It seems to me that tenure was meant to solve this, but it doesn’t. Academics are groomed and selected to be career climbers, willing to sacrifice anything to please the gods of their establishment. 1000 years later, still a monastery.

• by kfk on 5/12/19, 9:57 AM

  Honest question, how does it work if you are trying to have a good balance man/women in your team? Especially in IT trying to keep a good mix and avoid man only teams? Is this kind of advise even “safe” to ask these days?