Oscar voters so white? Hiring effects of an evaluator’s diversity intervention
23 Oct 2026
12:30 -14:00
Times shown in local time
Open to: All
Room W4.05 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Strategy and International Business seminar
Speaker: Dr Daphné Baldassari, USC Marshall School of Business
About the seminar topic
How organisations respond to social activism is a long-standing question in organisational theory, yet activists increasingly target the intermediaries that evaluate organisations rather than organisations themselves. I examine how organisations respond to this indirect pressure in the context of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, which protested the lack of racial diversity among Academy Award nominees, and the Academy’s A2020 initiative to double the number of racial-minority members. I argue that the campaign and the intervention sent a joint signal that criteria for recognition might be shifting: the campaign made racial exclusion salient, while the Academy’s structural response made the issue consequential for an evaluator whose legitimacy had been challenged. Because organisations had to interpret this signal before they could verify whether it would affect awards, their responses were heterogeneous, varying across organisations and occupations. Using data on 189,289 hiring outcomes from 6,999 English-language films released in the United States between 2010 and 2021, I compare award-seeking with non-award-seeking productions to separate the response to this joint signal from broader social-movement trends. Racial-minority representation increased gradually over the rollout period, rising 2.8 percentage points more on award-seeking films than on non-award-seeking films, a 17% increase over the pre-period baseline, with larger gains in more visible occupations. The findings show how activist pressure on an evaluator can reshape the practices of the organisations it evaluates, and why that change is uneven.
Speaker bio
Daphné Baldassari is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organization at the USC Marshall School of Business. She studies how firms and other organisations respond strategically when social movements and structural interventions target inequality in evaluation and hiring, and what happens in periods of retrenchment, when that support is rolled back. Her research shows that these responses carry real consequences for who gains and who bears penalties, even among workers within the same demographic group. She uses quantitative methods and large-scale archival data, mostly from creative and knowledge-intensive industries (film, television, science), where project-based work makes these practices unusually observable. Her work on the #OscarsSoWhite campaign and the Academy’s diversity intervention received the Strategic Management Society’s Best Paper, Best PhD Paper, and Best Responsible Research prizes in 2023. Current projects examine how exposure to tokenism accumulates across careers in US television and the gendered consequences of the 2025 NIH grant terminations. She serves on the editorial review board of Organization Science and holds a PhD in Strategic Management from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, an MS in economics from the Paris School of Economics, and an MS in engineering from Mines Paris.
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No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.