Movies

Have the Oscars encouraged more diverse hiring practices in film? A U of T researcher breaks down the data

siddiq22 — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 18:38:00 +0000

Have the Oscars encouraged more diverse hiring practices in film? A U of T researcher breaks down the data

siddiq22 Fri, 03/10/2023 - 13:38

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Actors Riz Ahmed, left, and Allison Williams announce the nominations for the 2023 Academy Awards, which will be presented on March 12 (photo by Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Topic

City & Culture

Diversity and Inclusion

Awards

Film

Movies

Research

Rotman School of Management

Outrage gripped the Academy Awards in 2015 when, for the second year in a row, only white actors were nominated in the best acting categories. The #OscarsSoWhite hashtag quickly took over social media as the public and celebrities alike demanded change.

In response, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – the voting body that determines the Oscar nominees and winners – committed to diversifying itself. Six years later, six actors – or roughly 30 per cent of the acting nominees in 2023 – identify as part of a racial minority.

“I think this is a very positive signal,” says Daphne Baldassari, a Ph.D candidate in strategic management in the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and a research fellow at the Institute of Gender and the Economy.

She notes that in recent years, many industries have reckoned with racial discrimination and made efforts to diversify their workforces. But few have dealt with the issue as publicly as the film and television sector.

Following the 2015 backlash, the academy added 683 new members to its 5,700-plus voting body, 46 per cent of whom were women and 41 per cent of whom were from underrepresented racial groups. (The academy was previously 94 per cent white and 77 per cent male, according to the Los Angeles Times.)

The impact of this diversification goes beyond a more diverse nominee group, according to a chapter of Baldassari’s dissertation, “Oscars So White? Hiring Effects of an Evaluator’s Diversity Intervention.”

Many film companies seek the reputational bump from the academy, and after its membership changed to be more inclusive, studios looking to score an Oscar were more likely adjust their hiring practices to ensure more diverse representation, Baldassari found.

The 2022 hit film Everything Everywhere All at Once is nominated in 11 categories at this year's Oscars, including Best Picture (photo courtesy of A24 Films)

Working with Luminate Film & TV – the global entertainment data company formerly known as MRC Data and Nielsen Music – Baldassari analyzed the hiring data of 6,999 feature-length films released in the U.S. between 2010 and 2021. Overall, she examined more than 193,000 staffing choices in the industry.

She approached the research with three hypotheses. First, Baldassari posited that following the decision to create a more diverse judging committee for the Oscars, award-seeking companies would be more likely to do the same. Second, she believed that the positive hiring effect would be most prominent in visible roles – the top-billed or above-the-line positions such as producers, actors and directors. (These are in comparison to “below-the-line” roles, such cinematographers and costume designers.) And third, she surmised that people already affiliated with an award body – such as existing members and nominees – were most likely to see the benefits than those who were not.

Overall, her theories proved accurate. Following the academy's 2016 diversification efforts, there was an increase in racial diversity of the makeup of film crews – with some caveats. Across the board, women and racial minorities were about five per cent more likely to be hired to work on a film.

However, those in above-the-line roles saw their chance of getting hired increase by 3.3 percentage points, while those in below-the-line positions saw no statistical change to their chances of being hired.

“Change here is not necessarily driven by an intrinsic motivation of driving diversity,” Baldassari says. “Award-seeking films seek to appeal to the academy, so positive hiring effects stay in the most visible occupations.”

Women and racial minorities who had previously worked on award-seeking films saw a 1.6 per cent increase in the chance that they’d be re-hired, while those who had not worked on an award-seeking film saw no change.

Regardless of how small the changes were, they made a difference to what audiences see on screen and which movies get recognition.

“Recently we’ve been seeing new depictions of lots of people on screen, such as Asian Americans with movies like Minari and Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Baldassari says. “These movies are totally different from what we would have seen 20 years ago, and we’re moving away from the stereotypes.”

Baldassari believes her findings can be applied to other industries that have existing third-party evaluators or awards bodies. It is especially relevant for subjective work, she says, pointing to the culinary and literary sectors, which respectively have the James Beard Award and Pulitzer Prize to recognize their efforts.

As a first step, organizations should consider how their evaluation may sustain existing racial and gender inequalities, Baldassari suggests. Then, they should consider potential changes – such as diversifying evaluation bodies or adding new qualification requirements – and measure the impact.

“By changing the committees, you are opening up to more preferences and changing the standards – especially for companies that are driven by earning these awards.”

Does Hollywood hate Wall Street? U of T researcher's book challenges popular impressions of business world

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 15:47:13 +0000

Does Hollywood hate Wall Street? U of T researcher's book challenges popular impressions of business world

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 07/06/2018 - 11:47

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Gordon Gekko, played by actor Michael Douglas, delivered his now infamous "greed is good" speech in the 1987 film Wall Street (Photo by Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)

Don Campbell

Topic

Global Lens

Movies

Rotman School of Management

Startups

University of Toronto Scarborough

In Oliver Stone’s 1987 hit movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko famously delivers his “greed is good” speech to justify buying and breaking up companies before selling them for a healthy profit. Meant to be a cautionary tale about the excess and get-rich-quick financial schemes of the 1980s, it certainly isn’t unique among works of fiction and non-fiction in its critical portrayal of the financial industry.

But in his new book Negotiating Business Narratives, Sandford Borins, a professor of strategic management at University of Toronto Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management, challenges many of the popular narratives about business and the business world. Using movies, novels, biographies and histories written about the IT, automotive and financial trading sectors, he shows that how we think about these industries is often shaped by what we read in books or watch on the big screen.

Writer Don Campbell recently sat down with Borins to explore how these narratives can shape our perception of these industries and influence everything from career choices to key public policy decisions like regulating the financial industry.

Sandford Borins is a professor of strategic management at University of Toronto Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management (photo by Ken Jones)

How did you go about exploring the popular stories done about these industries?

We took 63 works done about these industries and developed a model that has eight archetypal stories. At the top you have corporate nirvana stories where everyone wins, so the interests of the protagonist, corporate entity and society are all fully aligned. At the opposite end you have corporate nightmare stories, where everyone loses. The remaining six include different variations of winners and losers.

So examples of the corporate nirvana are the 1984 book Iacocca: An Autobiography, which explores auto executive Lee Iacocca’s career in the car industry, or Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. Examples of the corporate nightmare include the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, or the 2011 book Once Upon a Car that follows the decline of the big three automakers.

What we found is that these industries populate the stories in very different ways, and they have different dominant fables and counter fables. An important question we explore is how do audiences react to these different stories? How are people’s opinions of these industries shaped by these popular narratives, and what type of reaction do the authors, filmmakers and producers want to get from their audiences?

So how do certain narratives emerge?

The dominant stories that emerge are very much the result of the phase of development the industry is in and how it's being covered in the media. Take the IT industry for example, which was in a rapid growth phase in the 1980s, 90s and into the 21^st century. Many of the stories about the early days of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Silicon Valley are mostly complimentary. These stories explore rivalry between companies, the strong personalities, or an industry changing the very way we live and do business. So it’s mostly very exciting stuff.

Compare that to financial trading, where most of the stories being told were and still are of predation and criminality. It started in the 1980s with the insider trading scandals and continued later with criminal litigations against leading people in the financial industry including Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling and Jordan Belfort. These cases provided interesting and exciting material for writers and filmmakers.

So while there were people in this industry who were building empires and making money by playing by the rules, I think the stories about people who try to make their money by cheating are more interesting for audiences. This is the case with Wall Street, Boiler Room, Enron, The Big Short, Wolf of Wall Street, the list goes on.

Is there any way to tell how influential these works have been?

There’s no quantitative research I know of that looks at how many people decided to get into certain industries based on what they read or saw at the movies. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t influential. Take the character of Gordon Gekko. He was meant to be the villain in a cautionary tale, but so many young men – and it’s almost always young men – took him to be a role model. That has implications. You see the references in secondary literature, in speeches by politicians and even with Michael Douglas self-reporting on the number of times he gets accosted by people saying he was their role model in Wall Street. I would bet that many young men have more recently taken Jordan Belfort from the Wolf of Wall Street as a role model.

There was also a popular speech made by then-Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd during the financial crash in 2008 decrying the mess made by the so-called “21^stcentury children of Gordon Gekko” who were responsible for ruining the economy. I think that a movie like Inside Job also built popular support for the Dodd Frank Act, which set regulations on the financial sector.

When it comes to IT, there’s this popular narrative of the wildly successful start-up. As a consequence, huge numbers of technically adept people want to create their own start-ups. But what most people don’t realize is that the odds of becoming a truly successful and highly profitable company are very, very small. Many don’t realize they may have a more satisfying life if they go to work for a large company. It’s a big gamble because many moderately successful start-ups end up with the founding entrepreneurs selling their intellectual property for a reasonably small amount of money – let’s say one or two million dollars – after years of tremendous personal sacrifice. Is this the most socially efficient way of recruiting people to the technology sector? I don’t know if it is.

What would you say to people who watch movies or read books about these industries?

Having a critical lens when consuming popular culture is important. You need to understand who is telling the story and what they are trying to get you to do with the story they’re telling. Take a movie like Inside Job. You should come out with an understanding of what the filmmaker wants you to think about the industry. It’s also important to know that distilling complicated topics into readable or watchable stories often doesn’t leave room for nuance.

It’s also important to understand the broader cultural or social context in which the work is being produced. For the most part popular movies and books about the IT industry over the past 30 years have been laudatory. But I think the winds are beginning to change and more attention will be drawn to the dysfunctions in that industry.

What inspired you to write this book?

There’s a strong connection to teaching. Over the past 25 years I’ve been teaching a course at U of T Scarborough called “Narrative and Management” that explores how popular narratives about public and private organizations are developed and portrayed in works of fiction and non-fiction.

My co-author, Beth Herst, also happens to be my wife. Her background is in English literature; she did her PhD at the University of London on the writings of Charles Dickens. So the focus on management came from me, while the literary and critical film analysis came from her. It was a true intellectual collaboration.

To save 30,000 lives, restrict movies with smoking to those 18 or older, public health researchers say

sgupta — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 13:32:02 +0000

To save 30,000 lives, restrict movies with smoking to those 18 or older, public health researchers say sgupta Tue, 09/08/2015 - 09:32

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(photo by Jayaprakash R via Flickr)

Nicole Bodnar

Author legacy

Nicole Bodnar

Topic

Breaking Research