White Women, White Men, and Intra-Racial Diversity: A Data-Led Analysis of Gender Representation in the UK Film Industry

Abstract

This article addresses the role of data in measuring diversity in the UK film industry and its mediation of underrepresented identities excluded from the sector. Through a data-led analysis of gender representation across 235 British films made from 2016, this study assesses the impact and success of the interventions made by the BFI Diversity Standards within the film industry, analysing the response data collected by the BFI for film productions that have adhered to the standards as a condition for production support. What empirical evidence do the Diversity Standards’ data offer for a link between gender representation and key roles, genres, and regional locations? The article then identifies some of the key drivers influencing the primacy of particular identities across the standards. I want to argue that gender-positive diversity, whilst representing a slender challenge to exclusion via the structural decrees of the BFI policy, can also be understood as the result of intra-race homophily, one that sustains a culture of whiteness and racial exclusion. The article concludes by considering the position of senior white men as the structuring agents upon whom rest the power to permit women entry, and the implications of both an absence of intersectional data and the rigid identity categories of the standards for the inclusion of BAME women in the film industry workforce.