Discrimination and Constraints: Evidence from The Voice

TL;DR

This study uses blind auditions from The Voice to provide evidence of gender bias in selection, revealing that artists are more likely to be chosen when coached by someone of the opposite gender, highlighting gender discrimination in decision-making.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental approach using televised blind auditions to identify gender bias in selection processes, accounting for heterogeneity factors.

Findings

Artists are 4.5 percentage points more likely to be selected by opposite-gender coaches.

Gender bias varies with team gender composition and performance order.

The method isolates exogenous gender bias in a real-world setting.

Abstract

Gender discrimination in the hiring process is one significant factor contributing to labor market disparities. However, there is little evidence on the extent to which gender bias by hiring managers is responsible for these disparities. In this paper, I exploit a unique dataset of blind auditions of The Voice television show as an experiment to identify own gender bias in the selection process. The first televised stage audition, in which four noteworthy recording artists are coaches, listens to the contestants blindly (chairs facing away from the stage) to avoid seeing the contestant. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, a coach (hiring person) is demonstrably exogenous with respect to the artist's gender, I find that artists are 4.5 percentage points (11 percent) more likely to be selected when they are the recipients of an opposite-gender coach. I also utilize the machine-learning approach in Athey et al. (2018) to include heterogeneity from team gender composition, order of performance, and failure rates of the coaches. The findings offer a new perspective to enrich past research on gender discrimination, shedding light on the instances of gender bias variation by the gender of the decision maker and team gender composition.