On Jul 23, 2005, at 6:02 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:
I remember reading somewhere recently about the change in orchestras where someone entirely attributed the increasing hiring of women entirely to the institution of blind auditions 10 or 15 years ago. There was a particularly striking passage by one orchestra manager who said that he couldn't imagine that he'd been prejudiced against women, but once the blind auditions were in place, his orchestra started hiring more women as a matter of course, and he was forced to conclude that he and his hiring colleagues were, indeed, tacitly prejudiced against women.
Isn't it possible that at least part of the reason was because more qualified female candidates were auditioning? Not only would they be more encouraged to audition by the new blind hiring rules, but they had reaped the benefits of the previous decade or two of feminist activism affecting their education and mindset. When I was starting my university schooling, the male music students outnumbered the females by about 2 to 1. These days at the same school, those proportions are approximately reversed. In the part-time orchestra I play in regularly, women are fully 80% of the membership. It's completely normal that more women are going to be hired now than before.
Christopher _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
