Gender bias in competitive music composition evaluation: an experimental study

We study women’s underrepresentation in science by experimentally examining gender imbalance in music composition and whether it is due to unfair judgment in evaluative settings. We invite composition faculty to rate new compositions associated with randomly assigned gendered names along with live recordings directed by the same conductor. We find no evidence of gender bias against women, and in fact compositions associated with female names are rated higher than those associated with male names. Further, reviewers do not favor compositions by composers of their own gender. We find suggestive evidence that male faculty and senior faculty favor female composers in both overall and structured evaluations. These findings should be interpreted with caution, as the study’s external validity is limited by the modest response rate and demographic composition of respondents.