It’s time to end gendered acting awards at Emmys and Oscars. Here’s why.
Momentum is slowly building toward breaking down a gender wall at awards ceremonies like the Primetime Emmys.
It won't happen immediately, but it is the right move for the Emmys and other major awards shows. Ending the actor/actress categories would be a big step toward including more performers who don't identify with binary gender descriptions and would eliminate a distinction that has nothing to do with the craft of acting.
The long tradition of performance categories split between men and women has eroded in recent years: The Grammys dropped them in 2012, and MTV's Movie and TV and Video Music awards discarded them in 2017. In June, the Television Academy made a smaller but significant adjustment in that direction, allowing Emmy nominees and winners to be designated as gender-neutral "performers" – instead of actor or actress – when receiving their honors. And the Brit Awards, honoring excellence in music, on Nov. 22 announced plans to eliminate male and female categories starting in 2022, and instead will honor U.K. and International Artist of the Year awards.
Change would have to be undertaken carefully, after awards groups make their voting memberships more representative, in order to avoid a feared outcome: a dramatic decline in nominations and awards for women.
"Historically, the industry has not created as many opportunities for women as for men. So separating the genders was a clear way of making sure that we acknowledge both," says Melissa Silverstein, founder of Women and Hollywood, which advocates for gender diversity and inclusion. "In the conversations our culture is having right now on the topic, it (leads) all of us to rethink inclusion. But we want to make sure that everybody has equal access to opportunities."
Traditional gender distinctions are outdated in a changing culture
At a time when a growing number of performers identify as nonbinary, including Asia Kate Dillon, Demi Lovato and Sam Smith, traditional male and female categories can feel exclusionary.
"Billions" star Dillon has called for the abolition of gender-specific categories for some time, writing in an open letter to Screen Actors Guild officials last year that those distinctions uphold other types of discrimination and patriarchy.
"Separating people based on their assigned sex, and/or their gender identity, is not only irrelevant when it comes to how an acting performance should be judged, it is also a form of discrimination," Dillon wrote.
Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, which advocates for LGBTQ acceptance, finds the binary categories restrictive in a world where "there are more genders than man and woman," she says via email.
"People of all genders should be recognized and celebrated for their achievements, and any institution that tries to divide people into two gendered categories will end up excluding those who do not fit into those two boxes," she says. Diverse membership is key to ensuring fair representation for all performers, she adds.
There's also no clear competitive reason for a gender distinction based purely on the craft of acting. Even the use of the word "actress," now often seen as unnecessarily categorizing a performer by sex, is in decline: Many female performers instead favor "actor" in a de-gendered form.
Juliet Williams, professor of gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, credits the LGBTQ community for challenging the traditional definition of gender, which opened the door to questions about its relevance in acting and other pursuits.
"One of the very positive aspects of what's going on here is people in the entertainment industry are moving beyond the idea that gender difference just is, (that) it's essential. Instead, they're saying, 'Why does it matter? What difference does it make?' " she says.
Emmys take "a positive step" toward inclusivity
The new Emmy "performer" option is "a positive step toward inclusivity" with no negative effect that received unanimous support from the Television Academy board, organization President Maury McIntyre says. (Nominees still will have to decide whether to be considered in the actor or actress category.)
Academy members and actors are having larger conversations about the future of gender-based categories overall, he says, but "we don't want to make a quick decision on something that has far-reaching ramifications across the competition. There will always be concerns about how you make sure that it's a fair playing field. Would there be a situation where you would suddenly see a diminishment in representation because you collapsed everything down?"
Nevertheless, he senses movement toward ending gender distinctions for acting awards. "If you're asking me personally, I think that (in) five to 10 years we probably will not be seeing roles split in that way."
There are major challenges. Tradition has long been an obstacle to changing the status quo. And any move designed to make awards more fair and inclusive must avoid doing anything that could backfire on any particular group.
Hollywood's long history of male/female categories
Division of acting categories goes back to the first and biggest entertainment honors – the Oscars – which featured Best Actor and Actress categories at their first ceremony in 1929.
That differentiation didn't exist at the first two Emmy ceremonies in 1949 and 1950, which featured "personality" categories with male and female nominees. A female ventriloquist and college student, Shirley Dinsdale, won the first Emmy for Outstanding Television Personality. Gender-based acting awards arrived in 1951.
In addition to the Grammys and MTV honors, other awards groups that have dropped gender-based designations recently include the Berlin International Film Festival and GALECA's (The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics) Dorian Awards. The Television Critics Association has honored comedy and drama performances without a gender distinction since the group added individual honors starting with the 1996-97 season.
And newer Emmys performer categories – reality competition program host, narrator and character voiceover performance – are gender-neutral. Individual awards in other categories, such as directing and writing, haven't been divided by gender.
But will women be harmed in the process?
Eliminating the gender distinction would have one immediate casualty: cutting performer awards in half, a no-no for ceremonies dependent on celebrity splash to attract viewers and advertisers. The awards-industrial complex won't accept fewer awards or nominations, which are hugely important for promotion, prestige and career building. Competition has spawned multimillion-dollar sophisticated campaigns and an army of specialized publicists, consultants, event planners and prognosticators.
But nominations could be doubled to keep the star count stable. Since winners draw the big attention, new categories would have to be added, perhaps one for rising young stars. Maybe genre options beyond comedy and drama could be added – horror, action, young adult – with accompanying acting honors, as Variety has suggested. These might not be the right choices, but the Emmys could experiment with novel categories, as they did with 1974's Super Emmys, which pitted drama and comedy winners against each other to yield Actor and Actress of the Year.
A more insidious and damaging problem resulting from the elimination of gender-specific categories could be a diminished spotlight on women, who have been making progress after longtime marginalization in the industry. A historical dearth of roles compared to men, especially for women of color, could reduce the number of female nominees while voting memberships that lean older and male could favor men.
Martha Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, opposes eliminating gender categories, saying it could harm women's careers.
"In the history of the acting categories, if there had not been separate awards we would have rarely seen a woman nominated or win due to the ingrained gender biases and imbalances in the film and television industries," Lauzen says via email. "Some people might say things have changed and that it would be different today, but I have my doubts."
Her SDSU studies have found women represent just 38% of major characters in last year's top-grossing films and 45% of major TV characters in 2019-2020, despite representing roughly half of the U.S. population. Women's Media Center found women garnered about one-third of Oscar and Emmy nominations in non-acting categories in recent years, and Lauzen says that reflects what could happen to women in acting competitions.
It's on Hollywood to make progress in providing opportunity for all
Solutions are basic but challenging. Women should receive more acting roles, reflecting their proportion of the population, and awards voting groups should be made more demographically representative. In 2015, #OscarsSoWhite focused on the almost complete absence of actors of color among that year's nominees, but the campaign also led to a greater examination of entertainment employment opportunities for people of color on and offscreen, and the expansion of sclerotic awards voting bodies.
More representative voting memberships across awards organizations could result in more inclusive nominations and awards. Winners of the Television Critics Association's comedy and drama awards, which have been gender-neutral since they were established in the mid-90s, were mostly male for roughly the first 20 years. But six of the last seven comedy winners were women; so were seven of the last nine drama recipients.
Because gender distinctions aren't relevant to acting and lead some performers to feel left out, awards organizations should move toward ending them. But they should proceed slowly and carefully to avoid as much collateral damage as possible.
It won't be easy, but it's the right thing to do.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Emmys, Oscars should end gendered acting awards without harming women
