How do women fare in gender-neutral Oscar categories?

The Oscars have gendered acting awards but not in other categories, so I looked at 9,530 individual nominations since 1929 to discover to what degree men dominate the personal awards.

The Academy Awards have long been scrutinised for their handling of gender representation.

The four acting categories are divided by gender (“Actor” / “Actress”), whereas all other awards are gender-neutral.

Female winners in the acting categories provide visibility, but does this representation carry over to the gender-neutral categories of the Academy Awards?

I crunched the data on 9,530 nominations received by individuals for gender-neutral ‘personal’ awards (i.e. not ‘Best Picture’). More details in the notes at the end of the article.

How many people have received an Oscar nomination?

Being nominated for an Oscar is a rare occurrence, but over time, thousands of individuals have received this honor.

Across the 13 categories I examined, 9,530 nominations which were awarded to 4,355 people, meaning the average nominee has been recognised 2.19 times.

Some categories have significantly more nominations than others.

For instance, Production Design had the most nominations, while Makeup & Hair had the fewest. This is largely due to the way the Academy structures its categories, with some fields allowing multiple nominees per year.

Do men dominate at the Oscars?

In a word, yes.

Men dominate nearly every category except for Costume awards. Across all gender-neutral categories I studied, 87.9% of nominations went to men, as did 88.0% of statues.

This suggests that the Academy does not disproportionately favour men over women in its decision-making. Rather, the imbalance reflects the wider industry, where men receive the majority of opportunities and nominations.

In other words, the issue may stem from who gets hired and recognised within the industry rather than a bias in Oscar voting itself.

The male domination has been true since the start of the Oscars, but has started to wane ever so slightly in recent decades, sitting at 73.1% in the ten years 2015-24.

What are your chances of winning an Oscar?

For most people, the odds of winning an Oscar are incredibly low (sorry, I hope you already knew this) but what about once you’ve been nominated?

On average, 20.7% of nominations lead to a win, meaning roughly one in five nominees took home a statue. However, this varies significantly by category. The highest win rate is in Makeup & Hair, where 32.1% of nominees win, due in part to a smaller field of contenders.

The discussion around gendered awards has been ongoing, with arguments on both sides. Let’s examine the key points for and against gender-specific categories before analysing what the data reveals.

What are the argument for and against gender-specific awards?

Supporters of gender-specific awards argue that they ensure equal recognition for male and female performers, preventing one group from dominating the nominations and wins.

They also highlight the importance of visibility, particularly in an industry where men have historically held more power and opportunities.

By maintaining separate categories, awards ceremonies can guarantee that female talent is consistently recognised, rather than being edged out in favour of male-dominated selections.

On the other hand, critics argue that gendered categories reinforce outdated binary divisions, excluding non-binary performers who do not fit into traditional labels. Acting is not a physical competition where gender differences might be relevant, making the separation unnecessary.

There have been interesting cases studies

• Brit Awards (2022). After merging the Best Male and Best Female Solo Artist categories, the first gender-neutral shortlist ended up being entirely male, leading to criticism that the change disadvantaged female artists.

• MTV Movie & TV Awards (2017). Introduced a gender-neutral acting category, with Asia Kate Dillon presenting the first award to Emma Watson, seen as a progressive move towards inclusivity.

• Independent Spirit Awards (2023). Shifted to gender-neutral acting categories, leading to a more diverse mix of nominees, but also raising concerns about fewer acting winners overall.

The topic came up recently on the The Rest is Entertainment podcast. Richard Osman said:

"I think it’s ridiculous that the acting category is the only category that is divided. We don’t have best woman director, best male director, best woman sound designer, best male sound designer. This is purely because the acting branch of the Academy wants to maximise awards and attention."

The discussion raised the question of whether gender-neutral awards fairly reflect the industry's talent distribution. Marina Hyde added:

"What it does is it masks the lack of women in all the other categories, because you end up seeing people in frocks getting awards, and you've seen lots of pictures. But if you actually look, how many women actually win awards?"

We’ve already established that women win Oscars at roughly the same rate they are nominated. But how often do women win when competing directly against men?

The vast majority of Oscar wins have gone to men competing against other men. In most categories, a woman winning against an all-male field is rare. However, in Costume Design, a historically female-dominated field, women not only receive more nominations but also win against men more frequently than in any other category.

Notes

My primary source was the Oscars website, detailing who has received a nomination in every year between 1929 and 2024. I supplemented this with data from OMDb, IMDb, Wikipedia, and Google.

This research focuses on individual nominations in person-specific categories, excluding awards like Best Picture. It also only considers gender-neutral categories, meaning acting awards such as Best Actor and Best Actress were not included.

Over the years, the Academy has frequently changed award structures and category names, often splitting or merging them. To ensure clarity and consistency, I grouped similar awards together. For example, cinematography was once divided into black-and-white and colour categories, while various iterations of music scoring awards have existed, ranging from Original Dramatic Score to Scoring of a Musical Picture.

Additionally, some nominations were shared among multiple individuals. For instance, an average of 11.3 people were nominated per year for Best Original Screenplay, whereas Best Director averaged 4.9.

Gender was identified using pronouns in biographies, gender markers in databases, and media coverage. As a result, this research presents a binary view of gender, which doesn’t fully reflect the real world. However, this is largely due to the fact that, for most of the period studied, nearly all individuals publicly identified as either male or female. I began tracking other gender identities in more recent awards, but the numbers were so small that the focus remained on men and women, since the core question is the extent to which men dominate awards.

Technically, the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar is awarded to the producers, so an argument could be made that it is also a ‘personal’ award. However, given its name, how the press reports it, and how it’s treated on the night (with many members of the cast and crew flooding the Oscars stage), I chose to exclude it from this study of Oscars aimed at individuals. Sorry, producers :/