I expected a lot of outrage at the Greathouse op-ed, but never imagined so much of it would come from men angry at men like Ross Fubini — angry at the suggestion that the poor showing among VCs backing women entrepreneurs and high tech companies promoting women into the C-suite is anything other than the way things are meant to be.

I bet that the symphony orchestras of the 1970s thought classical music was something male musicians were more interested in and, well, just better at than female musicians. That would explain why symphony orchestras were 95% male — women just weren’t winning the spots men were winning because they weren’t as good, full stop.

They could have said “Nothing broke here so why fix it?” and continued to trust their gut, which told them they were selecting the best musicians out of the best intentions to have the best orchestra possible. They could even have buttressed their gut with the irrefutable fact that all the great classical compositions were written by men.

Instead, committed to the idea that they wanted the absolute best musicians, they adopted the blind audition, with gender and race hidden from the evaluators and lo and behold, the gender imbalance disappeared, symphony orchestras today are much closer to 50–50 than the previous 95–5.

Did women suddenly just get better and more interested in careers in symphonic music?

Or (hint: yes) did evaluators make one small step for women, one giant step for leaders everywhere by actively seeking to eliminate any biases from their auditions, whether witting or un?

If orchestras had defensively and reflexively continued with biased pattern matching when auditioning orchestral players, our symphony orchestras would not be filled with the best musicians available. Doesn’t every leader, every business, want to feel confident it’s getting the best talent available? For symphony orchestras, questioning their gut led to a revolution in music quality. Just think what it could mean for entrepreneurship and high tech innovation — something Silicon Valley prides itself on.