• Sexism is disturbingly prevalent in the world of classical music,
• New research from the Vienna University of Economics and Business shows that this extends to important classical music competitions,
• Is it time to get rid of elite juries, and trust in the public?

A decade ago, headlines in major newspapers read that “Sexism is rife in classical music”.

Has anything changed in the years since, or is the world of classical music, and the reporting of it, making the same bad noise? In an industry as elite and reliquiae as classical music, one might not expect change, fast or at all.

A brief survey shows us the answer: not nearly enough has changed. Headlines continue to query whether change is coming, sounding the same smattering of discordant and rightfully disgruntled notes they did a decade ago.

One example, from the New York Times, and printed as recently as 2021, reads, “Top Orchestras Have No Female Conductors. Is Change Coming?”

Another in the New York Times, from 2023, reads “A Conductor’s Battle With a Classical Music Gender Barrier,” and bears the bleakly telling subhead, “Claire Gibault has spent a lifetime fighting sexism and forging a path in a male-dominated profession. Her next targets: pay gaps and age discrimination.”

Similarly, a 2024 Guardian article reports on calls “for the [classical music] industry to confront an apparent bias that is holding back female pianists from pursuing concert careers, however brilliant their talent.”

The facts on the ground in the orchestra pit and upon the stage are still so dire as to continue to produce these startling and dissonant headlines.

Sexism at top competitions

The sexism in the world of classical music abounds against female musicians early on in their careers. Although an equal number of men and women train at conservatories, far fewer women become competition winners than men.

The head of the Leeds International Piano Competition, Fiona Sinclair, has lambasted the inequality in classical music. Speaking to the Observer, Sinclair said, “Fewer than 23% of career pianists are women, yet in the conservatoires it’s roughly 50:50. As they leave college, the men soar while the women are not getting opportunities. The more we get into actual statistics, it’s clear that something’s broken. The problem persists at the top piano level – festivals, recordings, venues – with men generally dominating everything.”

Researchers at the Vienna University of Economics and Business have found that expert judges at top international music competitions are widely and frequently biased against female competitors.

Assistant Professor of Economics at Vienna University of Economics and Business, Roberto Asmat, and his team, drew on large data sets to find that being female significantly reduced the chances that an expert jury of a music competition would rank the contender first.

They looked at data which covered 40 years and drew from 370 international music competitions in which both expert juries and public audiences chose a winner from a set of finalists.

The results of this research are important as the benefits of winning a prize are significant for early-career musicians. Prize-winning creates opportunity and press for a musician, attracts audiences, and identifies them as a talent, all of which can be seen in the take-off careers of male musicians, and the unfairly stalled ones of female musicians.

Audiences and sexism

The research also found that audiences made up of the public do not display a sexist bias against female competitors. The researchers uncovered this finding by studying the winners of ‘audience prizes’ at classical music competitions.

“Many musicians compete repeatedly during the early years of their careers, allowing us to track their success over time,” Dr Asmat and his fellow researchers write. “We find that while winning the first prize is not correlated with future success, winning an audience prize sometimes is. Audiences are therefore at least as good (and possibly better) at identifying quality than juries, if quality is interpreted as the ability to win future competitions.”

The researchers found that audience and expert judgments match only 38% of the time, but a bias against female competitors was not found in winners chosen by audiences.

The study also found that while winning a jury-awarded first prize does not predict future success in competitions (though it may affect a career outside of winning further competitions), winning an audience prize does. Audiences are therefore at least as good, and possibly better, at identifying quality than expert juries.

The researchers suggest that juries may be more biased due to their small size, where individual sexism can speak up and spike a result, whereas an audience is larger, usually made up of hundreds or even thousands of individuals at the bigger competitions, and idiosyncratic opinions are therefore averaged out, a finding that is consistent with the empirical literature on the wisdom of crowds.

“While the question “what is high quality art?” remains unanswered, we add a further observation, namely that specialists are not always reliable adjudicators of artistic quality, and, at least on some dimensions, may be outperformed by the lay public,” Dr Asmat says.

Retuning the future

The study adds to the distressing literature that tallies the effects of sexism and discrimination in the world. Something needs to be done, and the world of classical music tuned less sexist.

And things are being done to combat this discrimination, by women in the industry.

French conductor and politician Claire Gibault has founded La Maestra, a biennial international competition for female conductors in Paris, which attracts hundreds of contestants from dozens of countries. She founded the competition after seeing extreme sexism among the jurors of a conducting competition in Mexico in 2018. “We need to revolutionise this world from the inside. We need a different set of values,” she says.

The 2024 Leeds competition has introduced blind pre-selection rounds to disguise genders and has implemented unconscious bias training for jurors.

Women are retuning classical music for the modern world.

In a world in which audiences show much less sexism than elite and elitist juries, it might be time to follow the social science. Is it, perhaps, time to take equity in classical music away from those in charge, and put it in the hands of audiences? New research – and the lack of meaningful organic change – suggests so.

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