After Oscar winner Frances McDormand turned #InclusionRider into a buzz word overnight, the question arose whether a high-profile employee outside of the entertainment industry might seek a similar demand.

In the entertainment business, the inclusion rider is an effective means for a celebrity to ensure that more women and minorities are engaged on productions, according to Ivy Kagan Bierman, a partner at Loeb & Loeb in Los Angeles. Bierman focuses her work on employment and other business matters in the industry.

Bierman said she expects entertainment companies to negotiate an inclusion rider with language that includes a demand for “reasonable efforts” at diversity rather than specifying a specific number or percentage of diverse hires. “It will be interesting to see which companies embrace this,” she added.

Outside the entertainment industry, it's possible some highly recruited executive—a CEO or general counsel perhaps—could likewise try to insert diversity hiring goals into an employment contract.

Bierman said top executives in other industries are already “pushing for more diverse boards,” but she didn't know if any have negotiated a contractual commitment.

She thinks technology companies are especially vulnerable to diversity demands “given the gender parity problems in the tech business,” she said.

Ruth Wimer, a partner at Winston & Strawn in Washington, D.C., said certainly executives in other industries could seek such riders. “Maybe for the right kind of CEO,” she said. “You have to have the desire on the part of the executive.” Wimer focuses her work on executive compensation issues.

She said such a rider is not something one normally sees in an executive employment contract. Even if an executive does seek it, the movement “is not likely to be widespread,” she predicted.

Wimer pointed out that unlike an actor, who does not handle hiring, a CEO would already have the power to increase diversity at a company. The CEO also could have input into diversifying the board of directors, she said, without needing a rider.

On the other hand, a company could use a similar type of inclusion rider in contracts with partner companies and organizations. For example, Karen Roberts, the general counsel of Walmart Inc., recently described to Corporate Counsel how the retailer demands certain levels of diversity from the outside law firms it hires to represent the company.

Roberts also said Walmart has begun to expand those diversity demands to other suppliers of goods and services for which it contracts.

The inclusion rider was brought to the entertainment industry by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, with the help of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll partner Kalpana Kotagal, according to The Recorder, an ALM sibling publication.