Articles

Gender equity policy and visibility politics in the film and television industries

Kevin Guyan, Doris Ruth Eikhof & Amanda Coles, Policy & Politics, 2026.

This article improves our understanding of visibility in relation to gender equity policy in the film and TV industries and beyond, where visibility is typically imagined to be positive or beneficial. Drawing on new empirical data from an internationally comparative study of gender equity policy in film and TV in the UK, Canada and Germany, we identify three imaginaries of visibility in relation to gender equity policies: visibility is imagined as evidencing problems, as providing a solution and as demonstrating action. We show that imagining visibility in these ways limits the scope of gender inequities considered for policy intervention and creates the potential for counterproductive unintended consequences. We argue that advocating for, developing and implementing effective gender equity policy requires challenging and complicating current ideas of how visibility works in policy making. As the visibility of marginalised groups is so central to gender equity, yet rarely approached critically by policy makers, this article makes an important contribution to the literature around equity in public policy broadly.

Keywords: gender equity, gender policy, visibility, film, television, UK, Canada, Germany

Queer workers, diversity data and the UK television industry: Is more data always better?

Kevin Guyan & Doris Ruth Eikhof, Cultural Trends, 2025.

This paper introduces new, interdisciplinary perspectives for understanding and analysing what diversity data is and works to do. Combining critical data studies with research on diversity and inclusion in the UK television industry, we explore the case of sexual orientation data. We discuss the ambiguous relationship between diversity data and its use to remedy structural inequity and exclusion. We show that diversity data brings into view a narrow selection of queer workers’ lives and experiences while further marginalising others, and that it is generative and productive rather than merely representative of the world around us. In so doing we provide novel and transferable insights for scholars and practitioners to improve both our understanding of diversity data and its practical use in workplace interventions.

Keywords: diversity, data, LGBTQ, sexual orientation, workforce, television

Constructing a queer population? Asking about sexual orientation in Scotland’s 2022 census

Kevin Guyan, Journal of Gender Studies, 2021.

For the first time, Scotland’s 2022 census will ask a question about sexual orientation. Correspondence between National Records of Scotland, the Scottish Parliament’s Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Affairs Committee and campaign groups present insights into decisions made, the uneasy relationship between queer identities and state data collection practices, and the question of who is counted when we count LGBTQ people. Building on Foucault’s critique of projects that construct population knowledge, the census is framed primarily as a tool to facilitate the state’s capacity to govern. My engagement in the design process enabled me to critically examine decisions made about the exclusion of non-binary identities and the use of predictive text technology. These decisions demonstrate how the design process constructed a queer population that ‘made sense’ to the heteronormative majority and ‘designed-out’ queer lives that the state did not wish to bring into being.

Keywords: census, sexual orientation, LGBTQ, queer, data collection