Stereotyping at the Philharmonic

Last year I posted about diversity at the New York Philharmonic (and this was followed by near identical articles in the NYT and WaPo). The general trend of women becoming more dominant in the strings continues. I attended this concert last night, and did my best to count up and remember the basic demographics of the players. Of the 13 first violins, 8 were women, and 3 of these East Asian. There were also 8 women among the 14 second violinists, of whom 6 were Asian and two of the men were Asian - 8 asians in all. In the viola section, 7 of 12 were women, but no Asians. I was surprised by the dominance of women among the cellists - my recollection is that out of 9 cellists there were only 3 men. Only 2 were Asian (one of whom tried to trick me with streaked blond hair). But then when we got to the double basses, things changed dramatically - all 8 were men (I couldn't tell if any were Asian from my vantage point, but of the ones I could see clearly none were).

The woodwinds were what you'd expect - the flutes were played by women, the clarinets, oboes and bassoons mostly played by men. And the several percussionists and 10-strong brass section were all men. And of course the harpists were women. All in all, the more delicate the instrument (requiring very fine and nimble finger movement), the more likely we are to find women playing it, while the bigger the instrument or the rougher its playing style (e.g., swinging sticks or blowing hard into long brass tubes), the more likely men will be wielding it.

Now this is interesting right now because Gene Expression's Razib has gotten into quite a little dust-up over a short post on how amazed he was to find an astonishingly good looking young woman avidly discussing science fiction at a coffee house. His accusers are essentially arguing as follows: Razib is stereotyping; stereotyping is evil; therefore Razib is evil. His defenders counter as follows: Good looking women are rarely interested in science fiction; Razib saw a good looking woman who was interested in sci-fi; Razib saw something rare.

You can see the problem here: the two sides have completely incompatible mind sets and so could never even settle on a middle ground or even on a "let's agree to disagree" point - there is no reconciliation of the two attitudes. For one side, the "validity" of the stereotype is completely irrelevant to its use - the very act of making an assumption about someone based on - well, anything - is out of bounds. I personally believe these people are full of shit - they are more than happy to make generalizations about men (or white men in particular). The other side sees patterns and is curious to what extent these patterns hold true and what might lead to them. That discussing some patterns (stereotypes) might be "harmful" irregardless (I love that word!) of how statistically convincing they may be is madness.

Then there is the Sailer-Gladwell dust up over car salesmen. Here, the clueless Gladwell, who's never done anything but write and go to school, is certain that car salesmen, the most manipulative and bottom-line focused group of people on the planet, don't know anything about selling cars because they typically take a different initial bargaining position depending on the race or sex of the customer. The gullible (though successful) Gladwell thinks the salesmen are victims of unconscious stereotyping - since the notion that men and women or whites and blacks might actually differ in their bargaining methods (as a general rule) is unthinkable.

That's why I find these patterns in the New York Philharmonic's make up so interesting. There are few more rarefied milieu's than that. These musicians are the cream of the cream of the crop, occupying a position of extraordinary prestige [imagine meeting someone at a party: "And what do you do?" "Oh, I'm a violinist. I play for the New York Philharmonic." Impressed?]. To be hired, they go through blind auditions, but that is after years of unimaginably rigorous training and single-minded dedication (from parents and student) and navigating through the most sophisticated cultural filters (think Juilliard). Yet after all that, the crudest generalities prevail - how small and nimble are your hands, are you big enough to handle a double-bass, do you like to bang on drums? To deny a woman a job playing timpani because of her sex would be wrong. Yet while orchestras use blind auditions, there are still almost no women timpanists (there might well be none for all I know) or percussionists or horn players.

By the way, this concert was a bit of a strain for me. Two Debussy pieces (ugh) sandwiched around two works by Finnish composers - a short Sibelius work (the evening's highlight - Sibelius was ethnically a Swede) and an excruciating new work by a female Finn, Kaija Saariaho. A Finnish female composer - talk about breaking stereotypes! I can assure you, though, that few left that concert wishing there were more of them.