Can The Inclusion Rider Actually Make an Impact?
Her stirring and empowering speech was coming to a close, and you could feel it building toward a big ending.
“I have two words to leave with you tonight, ladies and gentlemen,” she said before dropping the would-be grand finale…“Inclusion rider.”
I’ll be honest — I looked like this when she said it:
I hadn’t heard of an inclusion rider before actress Frances McDormand’s now infamous Oscar acceptance speech. And I’m not the only one. The Merriam-Webster dictionary indicated that many, many people were searching these same terms that night.
In fact, McDormand said that she’d just learned of the concept a week prior to the Oscars, and it so moved her — it being so practical and possible — that she felt the need to speak it aloud on one of the industry’s grandest stages.
An inclusion rider is “a stipulation that actors and actresses can ask (or demand) to have inserted into their contracts, which would require a certain level of diversity among a film’s cast and crew,” explains NPR. By design, it’s meant to increase on and off screen visibility and opportunities for women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities.
It was first written about in 2014, when Stacy L. Smith, director of USC Annenberg’s Media, Diversity, and Social Change Initiative, wrote a column in The Hollywood Reporter introducing the idea. She later expounded on it during a Ted Talk after working on details with lawyer Kalpana Kotagal and actress, producer, and advocate Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni.
But it was McDormand’s big moment that brought the concept of the inclusion rider to the masses, which in turn, put pressure on those in the industry to start taking action. According to an article in Deadline, “Soon after the Oscars, filmmakers Michael B. Jordan, Brie Larson, Paul Feig, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck committed to adopting it on all their future productions, while WME (William Morris Endeavor) called for its adoption across its clients.”
Additionally, actor Benedict Cumberbatch recently said he’d refuse to take on roles for projects that don’t pay women equally, and award-winning TV writer and creator Ryan Murphy’s Half Initiative (which he launched in 2017) continues aiming for gender and minority inclusion on all of its many projects.
But particularly when considering gender wage disparities in Hollywood, has this momentum — initially brought to bear by the #MeToo movement and the #TimesUp initiative — continued to build since the idea of an inclusion rider entered the public consciousness? Is the industry making real progress toward pay equity and balanced representation in front of and behind the screen using this tool?
At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, there was certainly a palpable sense of related momentum. Eighty two women staged a protest to represent the mere 82 women who’ve had their films accepted into the festival in its esteemed 71-year history. “By contrast, 1,645 films by male directors have had that same honor,” notes Vox.
At this year’s festival, just three films by women were shown. And of the historic 82, just two have won the festival’s coveted, highest honor, the Palme d’Or. Actress Cate Blanchett was among the protesters, and she read the English version of its joint statement to the media:
“Women are not a minority in the world, yet the current state of our industry says otherwise…We expect our institutions to actively provide parity and transparency in their executive bodies and provide safe environments in which to work. We expect our governments to make sure that the laws of equal pay for equal work are upheld. We demand that our workplaces are diverse and equitable so that they can best reflect the world in which we actually live. A world that allows all of us in front and behind the camera, all of us, to thrive shoulder to shoulder with our male colleagues.”
It does seem as though these fair and necessary demands are coming to fruition, however slowly. The existent momentum is certainly there, even if more like a trickle than a wave. But as more women (when able and in positions of some power) speak out, organize, and take stands, more of their colleagues — both women and men — will do the same.
Actress Claire Foy, who plays the Queen of England on Netflix’s hit show The Crown, recently found herself at the center of a wage equity controversy after it was revealed that she earned significantly less per episode than her male co-star. She was given $275,000 in back pay as a result of the backlash, largely, she says, due to this budding momentum building in favor of women’s equality in the industry.
During a recent panel discussion in Hollywood, Foy said the process allowed her to have the “most extraordinary revelation about myself and womankind,” adding that it was “amazing that the conversations people are having now, people think we’ve always been able to have, but we haven’t.”
It’s now possible, she said, to “be your own advocate…You can make a point…without it being you being ‘difficult.’ It can actually just be you supporting yourself.”
While still a long way to go, Foy said it well. The progress thus far is in the collective action we’re seeing at awards shows and on social media, and in the act of speaking out, organizing meaningful initiatives, and making demands. It’s the ability to have these conversations in public forums.
And it’s in the hope that something like the inclusion rider — which sets boundaries, writes things into law, and start shifting the foundations of the system itself — will make the impact it’s meant to make.
