Gender-neutral awards – they seem like a great idea, but in practice might actually undermine the equality progress that they are designed to promote.

Last night, MTV became the first mainstream film and TV awards to adopt gender-neutral performance categories, with Emma Watson taking home best actor in a movie (for Beauty and the Beast) and Millie Bobby Brown for best actor in a TV show (for Netflix’s brilliant smash hit Stranger Things).

Emma Watson wins first gender-neutral acting prize at revamped MTV movie awards Read more

Announcing the arrival of the gender-neutral categories last month, the head of MTV, Chris McCarthy, said: “This audience actually doesn’t see male-female dividing lines, so we said, ‘Let’s take that down.’”

This is an admirable stance, and it is true that the world is seeing gender less and less as two divided camps. That is without doubt a good thing, but single acting categories could well be problematic when there remains so much work to be done on the undeniable male bias of the entertainment industries.

It’s not that Watson and Brown aren’t worthy winners - I would argue that they are, and the fact that they are both women is heartening – but I am less than confident that gender-neutral categories, if expanded, won’t just become dominated by male performers given that men dominate in awards bodies representation, plus producing, directing and acting itself. Let’s look at the statistics: until recently, the membership of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, which hands out the Oscars, was 76% male. It is now thought to be 54% male, so better but still not equal. Just four women have ever been nominated for the best director Oscar (a gender-neutral award) in its entire history, with one winner – Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker. The music industry is not much better in this regard, with women music producers relatively scarce.

It’s a point that Melissa Silverstein, founder and editor of the advocacy website Women and Hollywood, touched upon when she said that women are severely underrepresented in several gender-neutral categories at the Oscars (ie most of the non-acting awards). If the gender-neutral categories that already exist are monopolised by men, then why would this not be the case in acting categories?

Other awards ceremonies have mooted the idea of abolishing gender-separated categories, and the Grammy awards made best pop vocal, country vocal and R&B vocal performances gender-neutral categories in 2012 – and while non-male performers have fared well in the pop vocal category, the main awards are still overwhelmingly handed to men. (The Grammys are also often said to have a race-bias issue, which led to a boycott of the last ceremony by some black artists.)



So while it’s hard not to be pleased that the world is becoming less reactionary about gender, there’s a real worry that the creation of gender-neutral categories when the film and music industries are still so male-dominated might be jumping the gun. It’s an argument often made in other industries – why, for instance, does the Bailey’s Women Prize for Fiction exist? I’d agree that it sucks to silo women, but the truth is, if these all-women awards and categories did not exist, then for a long time women just wouldn’t have won anything at all. So maybe let’s level the playing field a little more before gender-neutral categories become the norm.