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Malcolm Gladwell discusses this issue at length in his book, Blink
There is one part where he discusses "Blind Auditions."

This from another forum:

This article by Georgie Binks in CBC news describes that phenomenon. A couple of quoted paragraphs from the article:

"If you look at a 1997 study conducted by two American university professors, Claudia Goldin of Harvard and Cecilia E. Rouse of Princeton, you can see why the blind auditions are vital. In 1970, before blind auditions were held, fewer than 5 per cent of players in the top five orchestras in the United States were women. Once blind auditions were used that number jumped to 25 per cent and now stands at about 50 per cent.

Trombonist Abby Conant is well known in the battle for equality in the treatment of female musicians. In his latest book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell writes about how Conant auditioned for the Munich Philharmonic in 1980. It was a blind audition pitting Conant, who the orchestra believed was a male, (her audition letter was addressed to Herr Abbie Conant) and 32 men. When the finalists’ numbers were called, there was amazement that she had been chosen. Initially Conant was hired, but then was demoted to second trombone, beginning years of battles."

another fascinating reply in the same thread: (bold mine)

Mitchell, that's an interesting point, in that women and minority issues are often treated the same, even when they're not. And it's true while women's participation in orchestras has climbed significantly (outside of Vienna anyway), ethnic diversity has not kept pace.
But at least in some cases, screened auditions also benefit ethnic minorities. For example, see this article by William Osborne,"Why Did the Vienna Philharmonic Fire Yasuto Sugiyama?"

Here is a relevant paragraph from that article:

The memoirs published in 1970 by Otto Strasser, a former chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic, illustrate the attitudes Asian musicians have confronted:

“I hold it for incorrect that today the applicants play behind a screen; an arrangement that was brought in after the Second World War in order to assure objective judgments. I continuously fought against it, especially after I became Chairman of the Philharmonic, because I am convinced that to the artist also belongs the person, that one must not only hear, but also see, in order to judge him in his entire personality. [...] Even a grotesque situation that played itself out after my retirement was not able to change the situation. An applicant qualified himself as the best, and as the screen was raised, there stood a Japanese before the stunned jury. He was, however, not engaged, because his face did not fit with the ‘Pizzicato-Polka’ of the New Year’s Concert.”

It's actually not completely clear to me where Strasser stood on this, whether he thought it was grotesque that a Japanese man won the screened audition or whether he thought that it was grotesque because the Japanese man was not hired because of his race.

Either way, these kinds of arguments have been around a very long time.