Klarinet Archive - Posting 000203.txt from 1999/02

From: DHmorgan@-----.com
Subj: Re: [kl] Women and orchestras
Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 03:51:12 -0500

In a message dated 2/4/99 6:37:59 PM Pacific Standard Time,
charette@-----.org writes:

<< From: DHmorgan@-----.com>
>Ah, but here's the problem. They've done studies that show that even
in
>double blind situations, evaluators will rank the performance of people
of
>their race and gender HIGHER than other races and genders. The
examples I'm
>thinking of have to do with writing, but I wouldn't be surprised if it
weren't
>the same with music.

I would hesitate greatly before making that jump. _Possibly_ it may have
something to do with a teaching tradition common to a nationality or
area, but it probably has nothing to do with race per se. If I were to
audition in, let's say, Germany, they may be looking for stylings and
musicality foreign to what I've been taught. I wouldn't blame race on
it.
----
Mark Charette@-----.org >>

It would be impractical to design and execute a study for every category of
bias imaginable, so it is necessary to do some judicious extrapolation based
on previous research. The fact that people consider the idea of bias a 'jump'
is no surprise, since bias thrives on remaining unseen by its practitioners.
I'm sure if you had polled law professors before they did a controlled study
of the issue, they would have been outraged at the suggestion that they are
systematically grading people of their own race and gender higher than
others--since they were grading nameless papers tracked by numbers only and
had no conscious idea who the author was--they would have considered that a
'jump'. That you speak of 'style' indicates to me that we are not discussing
the same thing. Everyone in the law school study was aiming for the same
'style' of writing--legal writing--and the teachers evaluating the students
were all using, in their minds, an objective criteria--sound legal writing.
But the bias was--and it--still there. Based on this and a lot of other
research, it would seem to be a huge jump for people who audition musicians to
assume that there ISN'T any bias.

There may, in fact, be nothing that can be done about it, but that's no reason
reject the possibility that it's there.

Truly,
Don

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