Variety: With awards nominee lists under increasing scrutiny, the British Independent Film Awards is launching a first-of-its-kind “unconscious bias” training program. All BIFA voting members, including juries, committees and the board, will complete the training ahead of this year’s awards.
4 comments:
I really like the idea of this bias training for three reasons. 1. The obvious reason that there is a bias due to stereotypes about minorities, both gender and racial, which needs to be addressed and eliminated. 2. This training also tackles biases that most of us (especially those who are not artists or critics) don’t think about, like comedy vs. drama stereotypes. 3. This training is called “unconscious bias” training; it does not jump out at you and presume that you are making prejudiced choices intentionally or even knowingly. I think that its breadth of content and its non blaming, non judgemental tone will make people more receptive to the training and more impressionable to its teachings. I’m interested to see if the results are noticeable. It doesn’t feel good to have your biases pointed out, particularly those you don’t realize you have, but I think it’s an important thing for everyone (not just those who are judging things).
I think it is wonderful that the British Independent Film Awards is introducing bias training. I wonder how this training will affect what movies get nominated. It will be interesting to see in a couple years what movies get nominated and how the voting processes get changed. Also hopefully this will be a signal to other theater and film awards that they should put these trainings in place too. When the article talked about voters giving more weight to stories that matched there own, I started to think about how people want to see their own stories represented. I wonder if there is a way to encourage empathy so that people can relate to stories that don’t reflect their own. What can we do as artists to make people feel more comfortable at movies that they might not identify with it? I don’t know what the answer is, but I hope that bias training can help to solve the problems in the award show industry.
This is such a great idea and very needed, especially in today's world. Theatre is intentioned to make you re-evaluate your assumptions and get you to consider thinking in a different way. While theatre and film have become more legitimate than when they started, I think in modern society it has swung too much in the other direction. The trouble of making art into a business, is that a percentage of the focus is placed on numbers and assumed statistics. "Oh, this movie won't fly with an unknown female writer's name on it." "Female directors don't know how to shoot tough subject matter." "There just isn't a market for buying female-driven material." This may be a soap box, but this last assumption was mocked by Reese Witherspoon in her Woman of the Year speech in 2015. It's a wonderful clip, and everyone should check it out if you haven't already, but more than anything it talks about how unconscious bias has influenced how we perceive people, the work they do, and their validity within the industry by their gender, race, and subject material. I am so glad to hear that the BIFA is launching this program, and hope that this can soon be a practice adopted in the U.S. as well.
https://speakola.com/ideas/reese-witherspoon-glamour-woman-of-the-year-2015
It’s good to see an established group addressing unconscious bias. It’s not only racism and sexism that can cause problems when voting, sometimes there are things present in our minds that we aren’t aware of. Though some people may not see voting and awards as something to get so nitpicky about, “winners” represent what’s favored in the industry, and when the favorites are of the same variety every year, chances are something needs to change. It all comes back to the all too familiar topics in the entertainment industry of underrepresentation, perception, and predisposition.
I’m interested to see how this training works out and if it will be enacted anywhere else following this cycle. When it comes to the subconscious, a lot of the time simply bringing the problem to the persons attention will do a lot of the solving for you, and if not, it’s at least a step in the right direction.
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