Whenever the Vienna Philharmonic comes to Carnegie Hall, much is made of its glacial progress in hiring female players. The Berlin Philharmonic, which plays at Carnegie Hall tonight in the closing weekend of the Berlin in Lights festival, has also had to overcome a long history of exclusion.

The Berlin orchestra hired its first woman, the violinist Madeleine Carruzzo, in 1982, though the achievement was quickly overshadowed by a noisy fracas between the players and Herbert von Karajan, then the orchestra’s chief conductor, over the hiring of the clarinetist Sabine Meyer, who eventually bowed out of the running.

The quarter-century mark seems as good a time as any to take stock.

Of the 125 players on the Berlin Philharmonic’s current roster, 17 are women, slightly less than 14 percent. (By comparison, at the Vienna Philharmonic, which hired its first woman in 1997, of the “approximately” 125 members in what is evidently a time of transition, 2, or less than 2 percent, are women.) For whatever reasons, 13 of the Berlin women are string players: 9 violinists, 3 violists and a cellist. There are also a flutist, a bassoonist, a horn player and a harpist.

Stefan Stahnke, the press representative of the Berlin Philharmonic, said yesterday that the issue of female representation is not raised at all anymore in Berlin or on the orchestra’s travels. (Then, perhaps to mollify present company, he allowed that “every once in a while” someone raises the question.) The orchestra is taking no special measures to redress the balance, he said; it will be left to “a natural process of selection.”

Or rather — inevitably — a human process of selection, in this case all too human. The orchestra, Mr. Stahnke said, conducts its auditions on an open stage, without using screens to shield the identity (sex, race or whatever) of the candidate, contrary to common practice at least at American orchestras.

Mr. Stahnke cited another contrast to most orchestras, in which members of the pertinent sections administer auditions. The Berlin Philharmonic invites all players to all auditions. Each member of the orchestra, including its principal conductor, Simon Rattle, casts one vote.

However one chooses to characterize the pace of change and the balance of the sexes in relation to those of, say, the New York Philharmonic or the Vienna Philharmonic, things have indeed changed in Berlin, and the orchestra has evidently learned to adapt. Until recently, that is, when the female cellist, Solène Kermarrec, entered the picture.

Her presence has created an amusing poser for a group that calls itself the 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic when it performs as an independent unit, as it did on Monday at Zankel Hall. In German, a male cellist is a Cellist, several of them are Cellisten, and a dozen are 12 Cellisten; a female cellist is a Cellistin, and several are Cellistinnen. As the name of a group (with all due respect to “100 Men and a Girl,” the 1937 film featuring Leopold Stokowski), 11 Cellisten und eine Cellistin loses a certain catchiness, to say nothing of egalitarianism.