A better way to hire

"I just don’t think women should be in an orchestra," said Zubin Mehta, longtime conductor of the Los Angeles and New York philharmonic orchestras. Mehta wasn’t alone in that opinion. The Berlin Philharmonic did not hire a woman until 1982, and Vienna held out until 1997. But starting in the 1970s, American orchestras made a small change in their hiring practices that made a big difference in the number of women musicians hired—from less than 5% in 1970 to 40% in 2019. The change was the "blind audition."