Inclusion riders: What are they and what impact could they have?

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Frances McDormand's Oscar acceptance speech (Magnerd, 2018)

Frances McDormand has had a lot of speeches to give this year after winning the Best Actress category at the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards, and she's used that platform every single time to say something about gender inequality in Hollywood and make change happen. Her final words of her final speech were 'inclusion rider', and the fact that those words had no meaning to most of the population until she said them is the exact reason she did.

In 2016, Stacy Smith, professor at the University of Southern California and founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, gave a TED talk (below) on her ten years of research into gender in the film industry. She gives a disclaimer at the start that "my data are really depressing. So I want to apologise in advance, because I'm going to put you all in a really bad mood. But I'm going to bring it up at the end, and I'm going to present a silver lining to fix this mess that we've been in for a very, very long time."

Stacy Smith: The Data Behind Hollywood's Sexism (TED, 2016)

Smith's data, while it focuses predominantly on representation on scree, reflects the facts of Follows and co.'s research discovered in the previous post; in both the UK and America, there are not enough women behind the camera. More female directors means more women in key creative and crew roles, and on screen.

One of the action points that the research indicated could change the state of diversity in Hollywood films was for big-name actors to place inclusion riders in their contracts - a clause that demands that the films they work on meet a certain level of diversity in cast and crew.

Actor Michael B Jordan is the latest to join the big names taking up the clause in their contracts, including Brie Larson:
Nothing has yet been said against inclusion riders in the press - most articles have been explaining the concept rather than questioning it - but some members of the general public have responded to Larson's tweet with concerns that with inclusion riders, people will be hired an cast based on their ethnicity, sexuality, gender or ability over and above talent. I asked the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative what they thought about this:



As the Initiative mentions, crew hiring will operate similarly to the Rooney Rule which was implemented by the NFL in 2003 and requires at least one candidate from certain ethnic minority groups to be interviewed for a position. With increased exposure to talented people from minority groups, those historic conceptions of certain roles can change within the ranks of decision-makers.

Inclusion riders are an exciting prospect, and are one way that change can truly start to happen. They can work alongside policies such as JJ Abrams' diversity quota which was introduced to his production company Bad Robot following last year's Academy Awards. With those in power supporting those who have long denied it, the power structures that have been put in place can and will be replaced with equality.

What do you think about inclusion riders? What else can we be doing to continue changing the old system? Comment below!

Read more:
- Read about the Annenberg Inclusion Institute's work
- Prominent women of colour in the industry discuss the fight for equal pay
- Ava DuVernay talks about A Wrinkle In Time, the first film with over $100m budget to be directed by a woman of colour

See 'Bibliography' tab on home page for all references.

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