Page 853 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

combat an imbalance by creating another one artificially, it has to come
naturally. But we put in place various measures, for instance in the pre-

selection round we had 366 people, which incidentally was more than 40 per

cent more than in 2021 and nearly 100 per cent more than in 2018, and 31 per
cent of those applicants were female.

“We applied a completely blind audition system to the pre-selection round,
so the jury of four knew nothing about the candidates, they just had a

number and their repertoire and we listened, we didn’t watch. So they didn’t

know the gender, the age, where they came from, who they study with or
anything like that, which was a bit of a high-risk strategy because it could

go either way, but what transpired was the percentage of females to male
that were selected to go through to the first round exactly mirrored the

peercentage from the pre-selection round. So we had 31 per cent of females

going through to the first round.

“We applied a slightly more qualified approach to the first round, so they

were filmed, we could see the gender but we didn’t know their nationalities,

who they studied with or who’d recommended them. From that process the
balance between female to amle actually went up to 38 per cent, so coming

to Leeds in the second round will be nine women and 15 men.

“While retaining our anonymous voting system, we had put into place

various firewalls which allow us while voting to take a look at how the
voting is going in terms of gender balance, and if it looks as though it’s

lopsided then we can re-vote.

“Without in any way trying to influence our jury’s decision because we
totally respect our jurors’ integrity, and our prime aim is to find the best

pianist, but we do know in the world of piano competitions it is heavily

imbalanced – it think it’s 18 per cent females have won competitions as
opposed to 82 per cent men – and in the general piano world if you look at

the top 450 pianists who are out there internationally, only 23 per cent are
female. It is part of quite a complex situation but if you look at the statistics,