So, The BRIT awards introduced an Artist Of The Year category as a gender neutral replacement for Best Male and Best Female Artist categories, but all five nominees this year turned out to be male. Whoops!
Total and utter backlash has ensued in every London newspaper. The BBC, Telegraph, NME and many more are very angry.
I’ve warned people about this. Going gender-neutral in a male-dominated industry leads to women being sidelined. It's as simple as that. I’m not sure why it's so hard for these award bodies to understand.
Accommodating Non-Binary people for this chaotic response to occur is akin to shooting yourself in the foot. It’s not worth it. You’ll just sideline women.
The Brits had stated that they chose a non-gender specific award to make them "even more inclusive, recognising exceptional work rather than how artists identify.” Well, guess what? Female artists lost out and whatever the intention, the result doesn’t look “more inclusive.”
Of course, now you have journalists doubling down on the gender-neutral categories and actually saying that there should be a mandatory rule that 50% of the nominees are women. Ladies and gentleman, I give you The Guardian columnist Owen Jones:
“My view is gender neutral awards should reserve 50% of nominations for women. Women represent a majority of the music industry workforce, so the Academy making the nominations should also be weighted to be at least 50% women, too.”
These people are relentless and they’ll never admit that they were wrong. Ever.