TY - JOUR AU - Goldin,Claudia AU - Rouse,Cecilia TI - Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of "Blind" Auditions on Female Musicians JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 5903 PY - 1997 Y2 - January 1997 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Claudia Goldin National Bureau of Economic Research 1050 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/613-1200 Fax: 617/613-1245 E-Mail: cgoldin@harvard.edu Cecilia E. Rouse Industrial Relations Section Firestone Library Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544-1013 Tel: 609/258-6478 Fax: 609/258-0549 E-Mail: rouse@princeton.edu M2 - featured in NBER digest on 1997-07-01 AB - Discrimination against women has been alleged in hiring practices for many occupations, but it is extremely difficult to demonstrate sex-biased hiring. A change in the way symphony orchestras recruit musicians provides an unusual way to test for sex-biased hiring. To overcome possible biases in hiring, most orchestras revised their audition policies in the 1970s and 1980s. A major change involved the use of blind' auditions with a screen' to conceal 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 increases by 50% the probability a woman will be advanced out of certain preliminary rounds. The screen also enhances, by severalfold, the likelihood a female contestant will be the winner in the final round. Using data on orchestra personnel, the switch to blind' auditions can explain between 30% and 55% of the increase in the proportion female among new hires and between 25% and 46% of the increase in the percentage female in the orchestras since 1970. ER -