In 1970, the nation's leading symphony orchestras faced a problem not unlike one that confounds Silicon Valley today.

Women 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 clubs.

In the orchestral world, that gender divide stemmed from a deeply entrenched belief that female musicians were simply not as good as their male counterparts.

"I just don't think women should be in an orchestra," Zubin Mehta, then leading the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra, told the New York Times in 1970. "They become men."



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 nationally.

Cultural bias

And, 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 math.

Swap the word "coding" or "science" for "orchestra" in Mehta's statement and it sounds an awful lot like things influential men have said in the past decade about women. While delivering a keynote speech at a conference on diversity in 2005, Larry Summers, economist and former president of Harvard, famously explained that there are fewer women in science and engineering because of "issues of intrinsic aptitude."

Perhaps the tech world could learn a thing or two from the nation's leading orchestras, where blind auditions are now an industry standard.

Much 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 genders.

Shaping perception

"Including names and explicitly stating gender shape how women scientists and engineers are perceived," said Sara Pritchard, a technology historian at Cornell University. "For one, we tend to associate science and technology with characteristics also associated with men and masculinity. If people looking for engineers had HR take names off of resumes, female job candidates would probably be able to avoid some of that baggage."

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 publication.

A study published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrated 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 test.

Computer history

The history of computer science itself is revealing.

Building computers has always been a male domain, but programming them has not. Initially, programming was seen as "hand-work," mundane labor largely performed by women.

In the 1960s, as computer programming graduated from clerical task to lucrative and cutting-edge endeavor, it also became a hyper-masculine profession.


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 1970.

"Blind auditions play an important role in attempting to make the hiring process for musicians a fair one," said Oliver Theil, a spokesman for San Francisco Symphony - the first in the nation to hire full-time female players who were not harpists. Today, about 40 percent of the Symphony is female.

Fair process

"This is the sort of thing that could definitely be applied to the tech industry," said Marie Hicks, a scholar of the history of gender in technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "Especially in Silicon Valley, where a culture is evolving where you get jobs through who you know, and men wind up hiring men."

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 field.

"There are some deep-seated cultural assumptions at work here," Pritchard said. "That makes them really hard to fight."
