Gender and Race Bias in the Judgement of Western Art Music Performance

A literature review demonstrates that women and Blacks are under-represented in the professional ranks of classical musicians worldwide. The current empirical study tested the notion that these groups were subject to biases that would affect their advancement in a classical music career. In the empirical work, eight pianists were filmed playing a short piece of music, two each from Black women, Black men, White women and White men. There were three observation conditions for each performer: sound only, full vision and point-light display (here race and gender information was not identifiable). The latter two conditions were repeated twice, once with the performer's own interpretation and secondly at a set tempo, which enabled a pre-recorded sound-track to be dubbed over the pictures. This latter measure ensured that half the trails consisted of a standard musical version for all performers. Then, 36 musicians aged between 16 and 26 years, matching the ethnic and gender groups of all the pianists, watched videos of the performances and were asked to judge them, using a seven-point scale, as if they were competition adjudicators or auditioners. The results indicated that there was no significant racial bias amongst judges, although some in-group racial trends could be detected. A significant, though unexpected, effect for gender was found-with female pianists scoring highest for their performances. It was suggested that this result might be due to the age and background of the observer groups. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ways in which race and gender research might be further developed.