Inclusivity and casting

[Justme56]

Elon Musk is currently looking at inclusivity policies/targets within the film industry (on X). This came up regarding Amazon Studios.

Notice how targets for women are inclusive of non binary people but targets for men aren’t? 🤔

🙄
and they say it’s not a men’s rights movement

'Self-identify as a person with a disability'?

Yes IME the category of "women" is the dumping ground for all "marginalised genders". Maybe "trans men" don't get a look in here though, must be all that male privilege!

I’m not sure this is awful- thinking it through.

30% the dominant sex and race, 60% everyone else (30% people who are not men, 30% people who are not white).

The issue is the categories are based on ‘default white male’- but then, that is in fact what they are trying to address. So they kind of need to start there.

Interesting.

It's basically like the Green Party "non men". It is treating white men as the default.

It is awful because they’ve split each category by sex, and then included male sexed people within the woman group in both cases.

They could hire 100% male people and still meet these targets.

Why not set a target within the ‘white men’ category to diversify it?

What Jackson said.

Self identify as a person with a disability?

What does that mean?

But yes OP. That's interesting and laid out in black and white.

It also does nothing to the practice of using women and other minority groups in absolutely tokenistic ‘speaking roles’.

It doesn’t matter that you’ve got 50% ‘women and non-binary’ in the mix if all the women have a single line and they’re basically just shop assistants, restaurant staff, secretaries and wives/mothers waving their husbands and sons off to do important man stuff in the world.

These kind of targets often provide convenient fig leaves for BAU bullshit.

If I do this can I get a PIP car? 🤔 😂

I assume this is because employers aren't allowed it ask if someone is disabled. They phrase it like "Do you consider yourself to have a disability or chronic health condition?" and the applicant can choose whether they disclose it or not. Anybody who doesn't declare a disability, can't be included in their disability statistics, so it only applies to those who "self-identity"

This self-identified BS really is BS. Some forms of disability have a profound adverse effect on people’s lives, but a mild suspicion of ND not much - we still have no definition of what neuro normality is. There are ways of measuring this kind of thing ie getting PIP, reaching standard to have special consideration in exams etc

If I don't identify as disabled can I quit using my wheelchair?!

Try it 😂

It's interesting. Is this for the US?

Two points:

First point, there are roughly the same numbers of men and women in all ethnic/racial categories, so a goal which looks at, say, 30% of white men and 30% of white women PLUS white men (the extra nonbinary people) who don't identify as men is, in fact, building a numerical inequality for women into the scheme where male people will be hired in larger numbers in what they would deem a fair outcome. And this is true for women and men in all the race/ethnicity categories. So sex inequality looks like an intended outcome.

Second point: What are they using as the basis for deciding when they have arrived at fairness? Is it that whom they hire matches the percentages of the various demographic groups in the country they talk about here? Or are they trying to over-represent some groups?

It's not clear. If it's the US, then some groups which are in the less represented race/ethnicity categories are much smaller than other groups, and there's nothing in this quoted piece which suggests that they would try to match that fact.

For instance, Asian-Americans seem to be about 7% of all Americans, assuming it's the US we are talking about here. So a fair representation might be to have 7% of various industry roles for them. But this quote doesn't tell us that, because all those groups are lumped together, so nothing suggests to us that this is what would happen, rather than, say, hiring 20% of just Asian-Americans to fill that desired quota.

It is this fuzziness in the concepts of diversity and inclusion which has always annoyed me, especially when it treats half of humankind as the same as any minority grouping, so that a spoonful of this and a smidgen of that is seen as sufficient for female inclusion.

The 'spoonfuls and smidgens' would always be wrong, but for numerically tiny groups they can come close to fair representation. For women? Never.

I'm wondering how many people saw that at Amazon Studios, before it was released into the wild, and thought "yeah! That looks great! Dead inclusive! Tick the box!"

I wonder if they haven't in the end put the non-binary in with women simply because the vast majority of them are women. Which if true would be kind of funny, in a depressing way.

Generally these kinds of quotas are pretty problematic, IMO, because what it ends up doing is justifying not hiring some people on the basis of race, (or sexuality or whatever.) It's easy to fudge it in your mind if you only think about groups in an abstract way, but the reality is if you choose a candidate due to race, you are rejecting another real individual on the basis of race.

I am also wondering about the numbers. It's not so difficult to roughly have parity to the general population in acting roles, and it can be part of creating a realistic show to do so, but it's difficult enough in some technical roles to be a problem. Hiring more women, for example, might be great but if only 5% of an industry is female, trying to get around the quotas can have unexpected effects.

As far as "identify as disabled" - that term is quite old, and the whole idea of identifying into these groups came to some extent through disability before it was adopted elsewhere. Not to say it's a good or bad thing, but it has been around a good long while.

Women aren't non-men.
And that 30% white women and non binary people includes white men. So you could end up with 60% white men.

So non binary people fall within anything from 40% to 70% of the categories:

30% women and non binary
10% lgtb including non binary
30% if they are white male non binary

lgbt etc could fall within 40% - the 10% reserved for that group plus either of the sex categories

the woman’s category of 30% has to be shared, so we in fact have the least

@TempestTost
I am also wondering about the numbers. It's not so difficult to roughly have parity to the general population in acting roles, and it can be part of creating a realistic show to do so, but it's difficult enough in some technical roles to be a problem.

Not all that easy even for the simplest of non-technical roles. Not sure if the numbers have improved, but the stats I read a few years ago were roughly 70 percent male extras on average even for general street scenes (thus roughly as bad as the ratio for actual acting roles.) It's one of those things impossible to unsee in watching films, along with the very different way the camera treats male and female actors - it never, ever takes the female perspective.

I totally get that it’s not good, that women are not ‘non men’, just as people of colour are not ‘non whites’.

The intention is to reduce the dominant category which is white men. Therefore 30% of white men and 70% everyone else how the target is worded.

If they’re aiming to increase representation of women, or people of colour or people with disabilities, the category doesn’t work.

They aren’t. They’re trying to reduce white men. Anything other than white men is an increase in diversity.

But the 70% category also includes men (adult human males). In fact 60% of the people cast could be white and male and Amazon could still pay their backs about reaching their quota.

If your plan to supposedly reduce the proportion of men, then writing targets that enable you to cast 100% male people is ridiculous.

Putting non-binary in with women in the ‘not men’ (but only if you don’t define man as adult human male) is ridiculous if your actual aim is to reduce the proportion
of men.

Reducing the number of white men as a specific goal doesn't seem especially positive to me.

They don’t care about women, people of colour or with gender identities or disabilities. They care about looking like they’ve increased diversity by reducing the dominant category. So the target is set in terms of reducing the dominant category.

If you start at the other side- increasing the number of women, or non binary people, or …. then the formula is expressed differently. And they probably should have, but it would be complicated. This is simple and broadly effective- assuming they do it.