The myth of the double blind

Although the double blind assessment of people, i.e. that both the person applying and the person judging don't know who the other is, seems like a good idea, it does not necessarily point to a solution of the problem of people not playing in a level field¹.

Although the story of musicians in the New York Philarmonic are a paradigmatic example of how the double blind (performers were behind a curtain) helped women get into the orchestra bypassing the bias of the judges, the same is hard to see elsewhere, such as in tech (see: gender diversity in tech), or academia (see: gender diversity in academia).

The core of the problem is the metric used to judge, if the metric favors men, then the double blind will only exacerbate the problem, since it will make it more valid. If women are given tasks of lower scientific value through their careers (such as teaching or taking care of other things in the lab), at the moment of judging who deserves a promotion they'll be at a loss. Without even considering how much unpaid work is done by women.