Seminars

Abstract:Women’s underrepresentation in science has drawn attention from scholars in many disciplines. Our study aims to advance understanding on this issue through examining the extreme case of gender imbalance in music composition. We conducted an audit experiment to examine whether such gender imbalance is due to unfair judgment in evaluative settings. We invited composition faculty to rate new compositions with randomly assigned gendered names along with live recordings directed by the same conductor. Contrary to our hypotheses, we do not observe gender bias against women. Instead, there is evidence that compositions associated with female names are rated higher than those with male names. There is no evidence of in-group bias either: reviewers do not favor compositions from composers of their genders. In the heterogeneity analysis, we find suggestive evidence that male faculty and senior faculty favor female composers in both general and structured evaluations.