“For auditions, we’d always go and find a nice long dress—we’d play up the fact that I was a woman,” Kim recalls. However, she always took care to ensure that her outfit would serve as no detriment to her audition process.

“My father served as a juror for many music competitions and auditions, and he would bring home stories of how wearing too much makeup or a dress that was too short could make or break the audition,” Kim says. “There were so many more factors that affected women that didn’t affect men.”

PASSING THE BATON

Women may lag behind men in musical performance, but the field of conducting is far more severely skewed. Even within Harvard, the invisible barrier stands. Since its inception in 1954, the Bach Society has only had two female music directors: Diana L. Watt ’81, who served as the orchestra’s music director from 1981-1982, and Grace M. Kao ’01, who served from 2000-2001. HRO’s recent trends also concur: at least since the arrival of Federico Cortese, the music director of HRO for its fifth consecutive year, the orchestra-chosen assistant conductor has always been male even though most of the leading players are female. Cortese, who is the conductor of HRO and is a senior lecturer in the Music Department, is also concerned with the gender gap.

“Historically, women artists have always been a tiny minority for social reasons. Most of these reasons are thankfully—if slowly—disappearing,” Cortese says. Yet stark divisions still remain; Cortese mentioned that for HRO, the applicants for the position of student conductor were disproportionately male in the past five years.

“Conducting is still a field where the imbalance is very clear. There are certainly increasing numbers of very prominent women composers. I would not say however that the numbers are even yet,” Cortese says. “There are much fewer women conductors than men, no doubt about that. Why that is so, I don't know. I guess it is a profession that has come for a long time with a sort of stereotypical ‘macho’ image.”

Cortese has conducted many of the great orchestras around the world, including serving as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He teaches a spring conducting class at Harvard, enrollment in which requires an audition. Last year, out of the 12 aspiring conductors who auditioned for entrance to the class, three were female, and one was chosen for the six-person class: Jessica D. Rucinski ’14.

Rucinski is pursuing a secondary in music to accompany her concentration in physics, and she has been involved with nearly all of the major music groups on Harvard campus, from DJing for the classical music board of WHRB to serving on the board of the Harvard Early Music Society. Rucinski started piano at the age of six and sang in choirs from second grade onward. She cites her initial interest in conducting as originating around the age of 13 due to her frustration with a bad choral director. “I would think, ‘If I were the conductor, this is what I would do to make it better,’” Rucinski says, adding that while most choral directors in her experience were female, this drastically differs from the rest of classical music. “We have these biases that we don’t even know about—we say ‘Oh, it’s totally fine for a woman to be a conductor, we’d totally hire her,’ but in practice, it’s not true.”

In conducting class under Cortese, Rucinski says she was never treated any differently than the male students in the class. “It wasn’t about my gender—the problems [Cortese] worked on with everyone were their own specific problems,” she says. However, Rucinski is still concerned about the vast gender gap in conducting, the persistence of which she partially attributes to a lack of female role models in the industry.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s own history bears out Rucinski’s claim—the first female assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was Shi-Yeon Sung, whose three-year tenure ended in 2010. Sung was also the first woman to win the prestigious Sir Georg Solti International Conductors’ Competition. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1881, has never had a female music director, though Nadia Boulanger became the first woman to conduct the orchestra in 1938.

“I recently read an article about why more girls don’t do science, and it’s because there aren’t female role models that they can look up to. The same applies to conducting,” Rucinski says. “If, when I was younger, I had thought I, as a girl, could have been a conductor, maybe things would have been different.”

NOTES ON THE PAGE

Arielle G. Rabinowitz ’14 agrees with Rucinski on this point. Rabinowitz, a concentrator in psychology with a secondary in music, is enrolled in the Harvard-NEC joint program with her twin sister, Danielle G. Rabinowitz ’14, and will receive her master's in composition from the NEC in the spring of 2015. Rabinowitz, who began composing at 11, cites her composing teacher and her mother as her role models.

“My teacher, Alla Cohen, has a very dominant personality and has always encouraged me to keep going with composing, especially at times when I was trying to choose between [playing] piano and composing,” Rabinowitz says. “My mother was a harpsichordist and a pianist, and as piano has played a large part in my life—I’ve been playing piano for the past 15, 16 years—she’s someone I really look up to.”

As a female composer at Harvard, Rabinowitz is in the minority. Out of the 14 more active members of the Harvard Composing Association (HCA), four are female. However, last year’s two co-chairs were both women.