The Big Group today emailed me due to my comments of the #OscarsSoWhite trend in the run up to the Academy Awards.  The #OscarsSoWhite trend has been the most covered topic this year so Big Group shared with me their  quantitative look at the ethnicity of Oscar nominees in the six main categories ( Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress in a Leading Role, Best Actress in a Supporting Role, Best Actor in a Leading Role and Best Actor in a Supporting Role).Check out their findings below from their blog/website:

For several centuries and at an increasing pace, people have been falling in love and starting families with people from other parts of the world. It is so common now that the concept of ethnicity seems to be on an inevitable path to irrelevance. Clearly, one glance at the news would suggest this idea has yet to sink in to the collective consciousness. However, after conducting the research for this piece of work and seeing how immigration and international travel have brought people together we’ve seen that so many peoples’ ethnicities are so frequently mixed that it’s surprising that debates on diversity arise as often as they do.

In a departure from our previous fashion-based work about the Oscars, we decided this year to take a deeper look into the diversity debate that has surrounded the awards.

In this data visualisation, we have mapped the “ethnicity” of 2,958 nominees in the 6 major award categories at the Oscars – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress in a Leading Role, Best Actress in a Supporting Role, Best Actor in a Leading Role and Best Actor in a Supporting Role. I’ve written “ethnicity” in speech marks because the major decision we had to make in this work is how to categorise the ethnicity of the nominees and present a fair visualisation of the diversity of the Oscars.

We have listed 6 different ethnicities: White; Afro-Caribbean; East Asian; South Asian; Hispanic and Other (being either a mixed ethnicity or one with only minor representation in the data). It is not a perfect categorisation of humans at all but for the purposes of communicating information, we found it was the best option. An alternative we explored was to go into more detail, using further sub-categories but this had the effect of creating what we felt was an appearance of diversity in the data that didn’t reflect the general concerns that had been raised recently – that the Oscars is very “white”.

These definitions in themselves bely an interesting element of the diversity discussion that doesn’t really appear in the media – when you take into account a person’s genetic lineage, even going back only as far as their grandparents, you begin to see a more diverse set of data. So many of us in the 21st Century are born of multiple ethnicities that if you were to create more accurate definitions of ethnicity, you would have to create hundreds of permutations that include every parent back up the family tree. Interestingly, if you took that method to its logical endpoint, you’d end up with just one ethnicity: African.

The research for this graphic involved checking the ethnicity of 1,638 Oscar nominees. As such, and despite several rounds of checks, there may be errors in the data due to lack of source information, errors in the source information or just mistakes on our part. Then there is the issue of correct labelling. Even with our simple 6-ethnicity system, we had many discussions over what country of origin falls into what category. For example, Cher’s father is Armenian – what category did we think we should place that in? Joaquin Phoenix was born in Puerto Rico to European parents born of people from 4 different countries. Some sources say he’s white while others claim he’s Hispanic.

We also tried, where possible, to consider the issue of personal identification. For example, Halle Berry and Sophie Okonedo both have parents of different ethnicities. Halle Berry is on record as choosing to identify as black while Sophie Okonedo has stated that she sees herself as both black and Jewish. We therefore have labelled some people as “black” despite a mixed parentage and others as “Other” to reflect it.

We feel we have been as accurate and fair as possible and if anyone feels disappointed in our method, we hope the above explanations illustrate the difficulty of the task. At times, our discussions over the “correct” labelling of a person’s ethnicity even left us feeling somewhat foolish and rude, unaccustomed as we are into digging into people’s personal histories.

In summary then, in this data we present the facts around diversity at the Oscars, albeit using a definition that we felt was the least-flawed of all those available.