The spotlight was on female artists who swept the top honors at the Grammy Awards last night. Meanwhile, at the Academy Awards next month, women won’t be permitted to compete with men in several acting categories. These outdated Oscar traditions of keeping male and female actors in separate categories perpetuates harmful stereotypes about gender and women.
At last night’s Grammy Awards, Taylor Swift took home the prize for album of the year, Miley Cyrus for record of the year, Billie Eilish for song of the year, and Victoria Monet as best new artist. In addition, Swift became the first artist to win Album of the Year four times (Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder, and Paul Simon each had three wins in this category.)
In 2012, the Grammys removed gendered categories, allowing men and women to compete against each other for all awards. Previously, prizes were awarded, for example, to the top male pop performer and the top female pop performer.
However, when the Oscars are awarded next month, Annette Bening, a nominee for best actress, will not be able to compete against Bradley Cooper, a nominee for best actor. Instead, the Academy will independently vote on the best male actor and the best female actor.
This approach harkens back to the origins of the Academy Awards in 1929, a time when gender roles in society and the workplace were markedly different from today. Women had only recently won the right to vote and were still several decades away from equal rights at work, so it may have been reasonable to offer separate awards then. Now, with films centered on women’s experiences and women ascending to top leadership positions in society, the segregation of awards by gender becomes increasingly unjustifiable.
Separating the awards by gender perpetuates the stereotype that men and women are so different that they can’t be evaluated as equals in their professions. In addition, separate awards perpetuate the notion that gender is binary, and it’s not.
Last year, transgender Oscar nominee Elliot Page told Entertainment Weekly that he hoped for a change. “Hopefully, we start moving beyond that degree of binary thinking,” he said of the Oscars.
Some speculate that women might not prevail in a mixed gender competition, and historically, the Oscars tend to favor men. According to an analysis by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, of 13,253 nominees at the Academy Awards since 1929, 17% were women, and 83% were men. That’s almost five times as many men that were nominated. Less than 2% of nominees were women of color. And only 16% of all winners across the last 95 years were women.
Ironically, the Oscars’ non-acting categories are gender-neutral, and these are areas where men tend to dominate. A recent report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University revealed that women accounted for only 22% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 grossing films in 2023. Only three women have won the Best Director Oscar in the history of the awards.
Although women have much more representation in acting roles, they have yet to reach parity with men. Another report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that in 2022, women accounted for only 37% of all speaking characters, and 80% of films featured more male than female characters. The gender-specific acting awards at the Oscars serve to hide these systemic inequities within the industry.
Men and women have different voices and pitches, yet the Grammys saw fit to merge the male and female singing categories. It’s time for the Oscars to follow suit and treat men and women as complete equals.
