We all leave behind a data trail of locations, contacts, messages, likes, check-ins and purchases that create an evidence base of information about our gender and sexuality. But – in the UK and around the world – this amassing of information is creating more flashpoints between data systems and communities minoritised because of their gender and/or sexuality.
The Gender + Sexuality Data Lab pulls back the curtain and reminds us that gender and sexuality categories used in data systems have designers. Someone decides whether the boundaries of gender are discrete or continuous, whether sex is binary or non-binary, or whether sexuality is fluid or fixed.
When working as planned, these datapoints give the impression of being natural artefacts that have always existed and will forever exist. But the constructed nature of these data systems quickly become apparent when something goes wrong.
These developments are taking place against a backdrop of rising anti-gender politics in the UK, USA and around the world, where data about marginalised communities has become weaponised in ways that curtail and roll-back LGBTQ equalities.
Administrative systems that classify people actually invent and produce meaning for the categories they administer.
Dean Spade, Normal Life
The need for the Gender + Sexuality Data Lab has therefore never been more urgent.
The Lab’s areas of interest include:
- Organisational approaches to the collection and analysis of gender and sexuality data.
- Design of data-driven diversity, equality and inclusion interventions.
- Use (and misuse) of gender and sexuality data in policymaking.
- Intersection of gender and sexuality and contemporary data systems, including AI technologies.
- Lived experience of marginalised data subjects, including LGBTQ communities.
- Historical legacies and political implications of counting minoritised communities.
- Methods and strategies for data ambivalence, subversion, refusal and abolition.
The Lab sits within the University of Edinburgh Business School and strengthens its strategic interest in initiatives that advance understanding and action related to Digital and Diversity.
The Lab is also one star in a wider constellation of University of Edinburgh initiatives, including the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s Critical Data Studies research cluster and genderED, a cross-university hub for gender and sexualities studies.