Over the past several decades, orchestras have changed how they hire musicians, and have begun to eradicate a long-standing bias that had prevented women and minorities from accessing opportunities in the industry. Since the mid-1970s, musicians have performed in the preliminary rounds of auditions from behind a screen, so that factors such as gender and ethnicity are not taken into consideration. With "blind auditions" becoming the norm, the percentage of female musicians in the five highest-ranked orchestras in the United States increased from less than 5 percent in 1970 to 25 percent in 1997.
Hearing 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 for narrowing the field, which has made it 50 percent more likely that a woman will advance to the final round. Other audition processes are completely "blind."
Some orchestras even attempt to mask the distinctive sounds of women's footwear -- either by providing a strip of carpeting to walk on, or by asking applicants to remove their shoes before walking onto the stage.
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