Gender Neutral Awards

There has been some controversy recently with the Brits introducing gender neutral categories, as opposed to the 'Best Female Artist' or 'Best Male Artist', because, as many of us predicted, it's usually women who end up getting marginalised and squeezed out, when recognition isn't guaranteed for either women or men.

But, as the Brits have no doubt observed, many artists are now identifying as non-binary/gender neutral, and so, it's inevitable that awards committees and guilds will start reflecting that in how they break up certain categories going forward.

Although I doubt there is *any* system that will please everyone, surely the best possible system (i.e. the least unfair) would be to do what some Scandinavian countries do with respect to executive board representation, which is to say that 40% of a company's board must be women (and from what I gather the same rule applies to men; in other words, 40% of a company's board must also be male). Thus, even if a company isn't 50:50 split between women and men, *at most* only 60% of the executive board would be made up of one particular sex, and the opportunity for discrimination/sexism is significantly minimised.

AMPAS, for instance, could do away with the Best Actor/Best Supporting Actor and Best Actress/Best Supporting Actress categories, whilst still ensuring a *minimum* number/percentage of women were still represented, by saying that a Best Lead Performer and a Best Supporting Performer category required at least 40% women and 40% men. At worst, at least 4 of the 10 nominees would be women, and going back to the basis for the change (i.e. non-binary representation), if 4 of the nominees are women, and 4 of the nominees are men, the other 2 nominees might, potentially be, binary/fluid. At the moment, the percentage of non-binary people is less than 20% of society, so even if only a maximum of 20% of potential nominees could represent this demographic, they still wouldn't be marginalised (UNLESS, by some unlikely outcome more than 20% of the year's best performances were given by the 0.1-2% of the population that is so far estimated to define themselves this way).

Like I say, this might not be a perfect option, but it's possibly the *most* perfect option available.