I’d Like to Scold the Academy: Tiffany Haddish Draws Back the Curtain

Late last week, actress Tiffany Haddish went public with the information that she turned down the Recording Academy’s invitation to emcee a pre-Grammy Awards ceremony pro bono, without even funding provided for HAMU (hair and make-up, if you don’t know the lingo) and wardrobe.

The Los Angeles 2020 African American Heritage Month celebration honoring Tiffany Haddish and Jeffrey Osborne. Photo credit: Eric Garcetti [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0], via Flickr.

I was particularly interested in this story because six years ago I got to attend the Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in Los Angeles and was blown away by its scope and scale. The technical production values alone were stunning as this was, even more than an awards show, a concert featuring everything from a lone singer with a guitar to a headbanging rock band, sometimes one after the other on two alternating stages.

The above-mentioned pre-ceremony is where most of the awards are actually bestowed and in years past was a private event, not televised. This year, like last year, it’s going to be livestreamed online.

The Academy’s response was to say that unlike the main show, which is co-produced with CBS, the Academy is the sole producer of the pre-ceremony, and they are a non-profit, so historically they haven’t paid performers, presenters, or the host, and the value exchange is… I’m sure you can guess… exposure. But let’s look a little deeper at concept of value exchange here.

Full disclosure that I have produced events that didn’t pay speakers, and I have spoken at events without getting paid (but certainly never a three-hour long hosting role that would be livestreamed to millions of people and is part of a larger event that cost tens of millions to produce). Which I have now learned is what the Grammys and associated events cost because I got a little curious and looked up the Academy’s most recent 990 report (2018). (Any non-profit should have these reports publicly available.)

Let’s just say there are non-profits and then there are non-profits! Here’s what I learned:

• The Academy spends more than $30MM on direct expenses involved in producing the events. Approximately $700K of that is on “entertainment” so someone is getting paid.

• These events are their main work as a non-profit. They position them as the way that they shine a spotlight on the work of musical artists and thereby serve their mission. The Academy has an overall approximate budget of $90MM, of which they spend the aforementioned $30MM on events, more than $20MM on their 186 employees and related costs and benefits for them, $40MM on professional services, marketing and the like, and only $8MM out of that $90MM budget on “grants and other assistance” for individuals and organizations.

• I also checked out their leadership for fun, and in 2018, of the eleven executives who are named (and salaries shared) as part of the form, the eight highest-paid executives were men. Of the three remaining executives, only two were women, so nine out of eleven execs were men. (Since 2018 they briefly had a women replace their longtime president, but she was fired after less than a year on the job and replaced by a man. There was lots of drama, as you can imagine.)

Surrounding organizational environment aside, the scope of just the hosting job in question has changed dramatically in recent years, to the point that I’m surprised Ms. Haddish’s union isn’t trying to prevent a very well-funded organization from producing a high-budget event for a mass audience that relies on leveraging the professional talents of any gender without compensation.

Tiffany Haddish is obviously in a position to shine a spotlight on this disparity, and the Grammys are an exceedingly high-profile arena for it. Haddish said she thought she had enough “exposure,” thank you very much.

Let’s not lose sight, though, that this happens to the rest of us who have no such spotlight, for whom certain kinds of exposure is a meaningful carrot to dangle, who are working at a smaller scale comparatively, but large scale as we work to improve our prospects by improving our presence. Presence which is, regrettably, more expensive for women to begin with, even as we’re statistically likely to be paid less.

We all make calculations any time we are asked to contribute our time, talent, and expertise to an organization and its event. We all have to assess our own cost-benefit ratio, and quantifying the economic position of the asker (as in the analysis I did of the Recording Academy 990) is relevant.

Only then can you make an educated decision on what feels right and fair and like a reasonable value exchange to you, and what feels, as Haddish declared, “disrespectful.”

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Elisa Camahort Page is a speaker, consultant, and entrepreneur, best known for co-founding BlogHer. She’s the host of The Op-Ed Page podcast and co-author of Road Map for Revolutionaries: Resistance, Activism, and Advocacy for All. Learn more at elisacp.com.