At last night’s Academy Awards, Frances McDormand used her time on-stage accepting the Best Actress award to issue a call for more actors to demand “inclusion riders” in their contracts. As #InclusionRider began trending on Twitter, Phillip Atiba Goff of John Jay College of Criminal Justice explained that an inclusion rider is a “clause in an actor’s contract that requires the cast and crew be diverse in order to retain the actor.” He praised McDormand for mentioning them: “That’s kind of a brave thing to say on such a big stage.”
University of Southern California communications professor Stacy Smith is credited with inventing the idea of inclusion riders, although she was careful to note that they are meant to increase diversity in supporting roles. As she told Vanity Fair last night, “It stipulates that in small and supporting roles, character should reflect the world we live in . . . If you get the Hollywood elite to adopt it in their contracts, it becomes baked in.”
This makes the idea sound quaint rather than what it is: a quota system. As the Vanity Fair article notes, the ideal inclusive breakdown today would mean: “50 percent gender parity, 40 percent inclusion for people of color, 5 percent LGBTQ, and 20 percent disabled.”
Professor Smith has high hopes for what these quotas could accomplish. In the Hollywood Reporter’s 2014 Women in Entertainment issue she claimed, regarding inclusion riders, that “If notable actors working across 25 top films in 2013 had made this change to their contracts, the proportion of balanced films (about half-female) would have jumped from 16 percent to 41 percent. Imagine the possibilities if a few actors exercised their power contractually on behalf of women and girls.” In 2016, girl-power director Paul Feig (he directed the Lady Ghostbusters remake) said he was in favor of quotas, too saying “I think we need to set these things in stone so it forces everybody to think that way.” And give Feig credit for this much: At least he was honest that these riders shouldn’t be a nudge so much as a shove.
But one of the reasons inclusion riders haven’t been embraced by Hollywood is that they create new challenges, not least of which—as with all diversity initiatives—is who will be included in the inclusion category. As Goff later tweeted about such riders: “There are a host of categories folks may want to demand. Gender, age, race, sexual orientation, and disability are the beginning.” Efforts to impose diversity quotas are always prone to mission-creep because the moral hazards are baked in from the start.
And realistically, how broadly would inclusion riders reach? Why should they be limited to the performers on a production? Shouldn’t they also apply to the directors, the writers, the grips, and the best boys? (So problematic, btw.) There’s no logical reason why they wouldn’t. But practically speaking, they would set up a giant conflict with Hollywood’s many unions.
The unions would have to embrace the riders for them to be effective, otherwise, why wouldn’t some big-name actors simply use them as bargaining chips in their own contract negotiations (either by demanding them or promising not to demand them)? Should the guy holding the boom mic on the set of the umpteenth Fast and Furious movie lose his job to a protected inclusive class just so the big-money star could feel good about demanding diversity? Inclusion riders would pit the unions against the interests of their membership.
Finally, would diversity requirements be applied across the board? The Costumer Designer’s Guild is 80 percent female; would it be required to achieve gender parity by including more men among its ranks, as others have demanded the Art Directors Guild (73 percent male) should? Somehow, one suspects this street only runs one way.
If Hollywood wants to undertake diversity initiatives, then good for them. It’s not like the last couple of decades have been a golden age for cinema—how much worse could it get? But “inclusion riders” are nothing more an unworkable quota system that would create more problems than they would solve if they could even be implemented in the first place. Which they can’t. They’re just another piece of empty Hollywood posturing.
Which is why, when you think about it, it’s kind of perfect that inclusion riders got their big moment last night at the Oscars.
