Someone should build an job search/interview site that gives "blind" interviews: scrubs candidates (application materials, resumes, etc.) of gender, race, age, etc. You might not be able to blind the whole process, but you could blind the preliminary steps. Even that would probably effect the composition of the final selections, as it did here.
If you're responsible for choosing applicants to interview from a stack of resumes, you can do something similar by simply having someone else strip the names out before you see them.<p>While you probably are not consciously racist or sexist, simply consuming mass media and living in the society we live in gives us aliefs (subconsciously held beliefs that we consciously know are wrong) that can affect our choices without our knowledge. It's substantially harder to remove your subconscious from the equation when conducting interviews, but at least choosing the best candidates to interview is a step in the right direction.
> Female musicians in the top five symphony orchestras in the United States were less than 5% of all players in 1970 but are 25% today.<p>The article was published in 1997; it would be interesting to see some more recent numbers. I searched briefly and couldn't find anything definitive.
To me this kind of thing begs questions around affirmative action and other methods of non-'absolute-performance' admittance to jobs/schools/etc. I totally agree that for one person to get to the same 'absolute-performance' point can mean that different people had to come a lot farther than others, but this article implies that it doesn't(shouldn't?) matter. In college admissions though, its never colorblind, socioeconimically bling etc. I'm never really sure I know where I stand as on some level the absolute performance for a job is what matters to share holders, other employees and even end users - but as a society, the idea of whole groups of people being left behind seems shitty.
Also interestingly, this study perhaps shows that there isn't a bias towards hiring women in this case for "political correctness". The screen prevents this.
The original study does not appear to have had any control groups, unfortunately. There are too many possible confounding factors present to be able to attribute any of the difference definitively to bias.