Kristin V. Brown writes: \u00a0In 1970, the nation’s leading symphony orchestras faced a problem not unlike one that confounds Silicon Valley\u00a0today. \u00a0Women accounted for less than 5 percent of the musicians in the top five symphonies. Often, the only woman in an orchestra played the harp, an instrument considered feminine. Orchestras were boys\u00a0clubs.<\/p>\n
In the orchestral world, that gender divide stemmed from a deeply entrenched belief that female musicians were simply not as good as their male\u00a0counterparts. \u00a0Zubin Mehta said in 1970 \u00a0that women should notbe in an orchestra because they simply become men.\u00a0By the mid-1990s, the number of women in the five leading orchestras had increased fivefold. By 2003, more than a third of players in the top 24 orchestras were women. Prominent women soloists emerged, as did female\u00a0concertmasters.<\/p>\n
The shift occurred as orchestras began conducting blind auditions. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, applicants were concealed behind screens and drapes. When gender was hidden from judges, more women made the\u00a0cut.<\/p>\n
In Silicon Valley, women hold few technical positions at leading companies – just 17 percent at Google and 15 percent at Facebook, for example. In 2013, women held only a quarter of professional computing jobs\u00a0nationally. \u00a0And, like the nation’s symphonies, the tech industry’s lagging number of women is tied to a deeply rooted cultural bias that suggests women just aren’t good at science and\u00a0math.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the tech world could learn a thing or two from the nation’s leading orchestras, where blind auditions are now an industry\u00a0standard. \u00a0Much of what employers look for in computer engineers – technical chops, clean code, experience, creativity – could be determined without meeting candidates face-to-face or learning their names and\u00a0genders.<\/p>\n
Research makes clear that the impact of the underlying bias toward women in science, math and engineering fields is immense. Several studies have shown that the advent of double-blind scientific reviews, in which both the name of the reviewer and the study author are not known, has significantly increased the number of works by female scientists accepted for\u00a0publication.<\/p>\n
A study published last month in the National Academy of Sciences\u00a0demonstrated that when looking to fill a mathematical job, both male and female managers were twice as likely to choose a man over a woman when given no information other than gender and physical appearance. When managers were also given information about the candidates’ performance on a math test, the bias against women persisted, though it decreased, even though both genders fared equally well on the\u00a0test.<\/p>\n
In the 1990s, researchers sought to determine whether blind auditions truly helped symphonies diversify. The large amount of data available and differing times at which symphonies changed their hiring practices afforded them the opportunity to ask such a question in the first place. They found that blind auditions were responsible for between one-fourth and one-half of the increase in the number of women in orchestras since\u00a01970.<\/p>\n
There are many issues facing women in technology, but a gender-blind initial interview could solve at least one of them – and perhaps its effects would trickle down, making technology companies friendlier places for women to work and encouraging more women to pursue the\u00a0field.<\/p>\n
Deep-seated cultural assumptions make them hard to\u00a0fight.<\/p>\n
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