At the 90th Academy Awards on March 4, 2018, Frances McDormand won Best Actress for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, asked every female nominee in the room to stand, and closed her speech with two words: "inclusion rider." The words appeared in Merriam-Webster's top searches that night.

An inclusion rider is a provision an actor or filmmaker can add to a contract, asking that the cast and crew of a production reflect the population of the place where the story is set, including women, people of color, people with disabilities and LGBTQ people. The idea was first proposed by Stacy L. Smith, a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, in a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter in 2014, and she expanded on it in a TED talk in 2016. Starting in the fall of 2016, Smith worked with civil rights attorney Kalpana Kotagal and producer and advocate…