Hollywood award shows are increasingly moving to rejig categories that have typically been split into male and female, with the Independent Spirit Awards and the Gotham Awards (and, here in Canada, the Canadian Screen Awards) among those to introduce gender-neutral categories.
Actress Jameela Jamil, however, is questioning whether gender-neutral categories will result in fewer awards going to female performers.
Taking to Instagram, the “She-Hulk” star proposed her own solution: maintain male and female categories while adding non-binary categories.
“Just asking… Would it not be better to give non-binary people their own category rather than open the door for Hollywood to completely shut out women given the known disproportionate amount of men vs women winning at award shows?” she wrote.
“If we now have enough non-binary talent to restructure entire award shows, which is GREAT, then we should add rather than run the accidental risk of erasing, no? I say this as an audience member because I am not going to be nominated for an Oscar anyway.. obviously lol,” she added. “I have no horse in this race.”
“It is a shame that this disparity exists in the first place. But it does exist. It is blatant and it makes the news every year within awards shows,” she continued.
“I have learned during my 18 years working within activism, that while some backlash is inevitable and indeed helpful, some of it only muddies the waters and slows down progress,” she wrote. “I feel as though we will see a growing ire from women who get shut out of award opportunities (again not me, I am frankly not talented enough to care about this from that place!) because we have created only one spot for a winner amongst 10s of thousands of actors, in a world that favours men. I don’t think it will help women or NB people to minimize the amount of possible winners. We should look to EXPAND the possibilities so that both GNC people and women have a fair shot in an industry that has for a long time struggled to treat others [as] equals to men.”
READ MORE: Jameela Jamil Reveals She Backed Out Of Audition For ‘You’ Because She Doesn’t ‘Do Sex Scenes’
She concluded her post by writing, “I was terrified of even writing something as benign as that in this current climate of social politics but it appears a lot of you agree. Thank you for taking my best intention to heart and for giving me the benefit of the doubt. I want everyone to win! To build the world we want we have to work incrementally with the world we actually have first. If we leapfrog progress with utopian ideals that ignore current proven systems we will collapse everything we are working towards.”
