THE COMPETITION CONUNDRUM

Do you think that men play your instrument better than women?

I want to ask you a question.

Do you think that men play your instrument better than women?

Most people will respond reflexively and loudly, “No, of course not.” But this is not my response. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.

I’m working on a post about the Metropolitan Opera’s recent oboe audition. To be honest, it’s taking me way longer than it should and making me feel sick. Here’s the crux of it: yeah, they had two auditions two years in a row for principal oboe. Yeah, each time they hired two white guys (excellent, I’m sure, don’t come for me) with nearly identical educational pedigrees. Yeah, they have what are supposedly the best auditions in the business and have for decades. But here it is:

There were thirteen people in the semifinals and just one of them was a woman.

In another kind of more musically exciting competition, the Cliburn, all the finalists are men. It is ongoing at the moment. And yes, the jury is half women.

I apparently “attacked” (according to many people) Frøydis Ree Wekre on the internet because I objected to her misquoting me and making strawman arguments out of my misquotes. I had never engaged with her before she misquoted me. This came over the Prague Spring International Oboe competition, which closed May 13, 2025. The three finalists were men. The twelve semifinalists were split evenly between men and women.

There has never been a woman first prize winner in oboe at what I consider the biggest European Competitions, Geneva and Munich ARD. As Frøydis Ree Wekre points out as “good news for Katherine Needleman¹,” even though they don’t have a website that lists historical winners, Diana Doherty won first prize at the Prague Spring International Oboe Competition in 1991. That’s 34 years ago. To me, this is not good news. (Complete aside about Diana Doherty and her excellence at the end of this post, as I don’t want to get too distracted on this tangent².)

In orchestral auditions, I believe there was also one lone woman who won an audition for a principal oboe position in a US Big Five Orchestra: Laura Griffiths at the Cleveland Orchestra. She didn’t get to keep the job because she did not pass her tenure bid when she left the orchestra in 2005. So a woman hasn’t held a tenured principal oboe chair ever in those orchestras, and Laura stopped sitting in a probationary chair there 20 years ago now. And to my knowledge (happy to be corrected), women also haven’t won a principal oboe chair in the most famed orchestras in Europe either (Vienna, Berlin, Concertgebouw.)

We can point to individual circumstances where women were on these hiring committees or competition juries and chose men. We can also point to individual circumstances where fully male committees hired or chose women. These committees and juries may or may not have been making the right decision at the time, especially since music is subjective. But we must look at the overall effect, not individual out-lying anecdotes:

Women have not done as well as men playing their instruments. We have not been as successful.

Even in what is supposed to be the most fair blind audition process in the United States, at the Metropolitan Opera, the semifinalists were only 1/13 women. Under 8%. Wow, and on an instrument like oboe where there are so many women oboists. For you men who don’t believe women’s experiences and like “data” instead, Nikolette LaBonte’s study found 45% women oboists in the biggest American orchestras in 2018. If you look at her data points more closely, you will see women more commonly occupy positions (non-principal chairs) and orchestras which pay less than the best paying orchestras and principal chairs on oboe. (More on this Met Opera semifinal when I stop feeling sick about it.)

If you’re not one of those people who responds reflexively "no, of course not” to my initial question, you probably fall into one of three categories:

• You think men do play better. This was me for a long time, though no one asked me the question before I figured it out for myself decades too late. I think most people are in this category if they look deeply enough. (more below)

• You’re one of those not terribly bright people who think music is like sport, and success in this field depends on things such as brute strength, force, hand size, and lung capacity.

• You think women are full of potential and achievement, but there are systemic problems keeping women from accessing the sort of success men have.

I now fall in this third category. I refuse to think that women do not or cannot play their instruments as well as men, though I was conditioned to think this from a very young age. If, as a little girl, I was conditioned this way, I can guarantee you that if you grew up as a little boy, you were too, and if you haven’t examined it, you probably still fall into Category #1, even though you know you can’t say that you do.

When I grew up, all my oboe idols were men. All the recordings I listened to were of men playing men’s music. Then, I went to a super elite music school, and studied men’s music with a man. I never saw a conductor who wasn’t a man (expect for one time! but somehow that didn’t make it all better!) and had to hide the one piece of music I played which wasn’t by a man from my teacher. If you think that sort of upbringing doesn’t teach you that men are better than women, and that doesn’t do serious shit to your confidence and make you feel lucky to be in the room when the men include you, you’re delusional.

Here is my prescription for addressing the systemic problems keeping women from achieving the sort of success men have in our industry. Spoiler alert, it’s far from just putting women on juries at 51%. And I never claimed that putting women on juries at 51% would fix systemic issues, Frøydis³. I acknowledge that my little prescription can’t fix centuries of abuse toward and lack of respect for women. It is simply a start and I imagine other smarter people would have some better ideas.