Everyone likes to imagine they are rational, fair and free from prejudice. But how easily are we misled by appearances? Noola Griffiths is an academic who studies the psychology of music. This month she’s published a cracking paper on what women wear, and how that affects your judgement of their performance. The results are predictable, but the context is interesting. Four female musicians were filmed playing in three different outfits: a concert dress, jeans, and a nightclubbing dress. They were also all filmed as points of light, wearing a black tracksuit in the dark, so that the only thing to be seen – once the images had been treated – was the movement of some bright white tape attached to their major joints.
All these violinists were music students, from the top 10 per cent of their year, and to say they were vetted to ensure comparability would be an understatement: they were all white European, size 10 dress, size 4 or 5 shoe, and aged between twenty and twenty-two. They were even equivalently attractive, according to their score on the MBA California Facial Mask, which is some kind of effort to derive a number denoting hotness, using the best fit of a geometric mask over someone’s face. That may well be ridiculous: I’m just saying they tried.
In fact they did better. All the performances were also standardised at 104 beats per minute, so the audio tracks from each musician could be replaced with a recording of a single performance, by someone who was never filmed, for each of the various pieces in the study. This meant there was no room for anyone to argue that the clothes made the musicians perform differently, because the audio was the same for everyone; and when the researchers checked, in a pilot study, nobody spotted the dummy audio track.
Then they got thirty different musicians – a mixture of music students and members of the Sheffield Philharmonic – and sat each of them down to watch video clips with various different permutations of clothing, player and piece. All were invited to give each performance a score out of six for technical proficiency and musicality.
The results were inevitable. For technical proficiency, performers in a concert dress were rated higher than if they were in jeans or a clubbing dress, even though the actual audio performance was exactly the same every time (and played by a different musician, who was never filmed). The results for musicality were similar: musicians in a clubbing dress were rated worst.
Experiments offer small, constricted worlds, which we hope act as models for wider phenomena. How far can you apply this work to wider society? There’s little doubt that women are still discriminated against in the workplace, but each individual situation has so many variables that it can be difficult to assess clearly.
The world of music, however, makes a good test tube for bigotry. That’s because in the 1970s and 1980s most orchestras changed their audition policy, in an attempt to overcome biases in hiring, and began to use screens to conceal the candidates’ identity.
Female musicians in the top five US symphony orchestras gradually rose from 5 per cent in the 1970s to around 25 per cent. Of course, this could simply have been due to wider societal shifts, so Goldin and Rouse conducted a very elegant study (titled ‘Orchestrating Impartiality’): they compared the number of women being hired at auditions with and without screens, and found that women were several times more likely to be hired when nobody could see that they were women.
What’s more, using data on the changing gender make-up of orchestras over time, they were able to estimate that from the 1970s to 2000 – the era in which casual racism and sexism in popular culture shifted to more covert forms – between 30 per cent and 55 per cent of the trend towards greater equality was driven simply by selectors being forced not to see who they were selecting. I don’t know how you’d apply the same tools to every workplace. But I’d like to see someone try.