Data and Responsibility: Toward a Feminist Methodology for Producing Historical Data on Women in the Contemporary UK Film Industry

This article addresses how feminist interrogations of research methods and knowledge claims have an important role to play in the collection and dispersion of quantitative data. Taking the contemporary film industry as a historical formation, and seeking to identify and understand patterns of continued gendered inequality, it considers the methodological and ethical dilemmas we have experienced as feminist researchers gathering and presenting quantitative data on the numbers of women working in the UK film industry between 2003 and 2015. It argues that data plays a paradoxical role in creating a sense of women's absence, and ultimately arrives at a set of guiding principles for feminist quantitative research in film histories.