Natalie L Wreyford
Dr Natalie Wreyford joined CMCI as a Lecturer in 2021. Prior to moving into academia, Natalie worked as a Senior Development Executive at the UK Film Council and at Granada Film. Natalie’s research interests are centred on access to work and equality of opportunity in the creative industries and are concerned with the mechanisms that uphold inequality, and the cultural impact of a lack of diverse creative voices.
Natalie collaborates with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Creative Diversity to try to affect change on both a policy and industry level. She was the lead researcher and author of Creative Majority (2021), which laid out ‘What Works’ to promote equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in the UK’s creative economy and co-wrote Making the Creative Majority (2023), which examines EDI in pathways into creative work through higher education. She co-authored Locked Down and Locked Out: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mothers working in the UK television industry with BECTU, Share My Telly Job and the University of Nottingham, and wrote the report “No One Left Behind: Identifying Film and Television Workers Most at Risk of Hardship as a Result of Covid-19” with Shelley Cobb for the UK Film and TV Charity. Natalie was the Research Fellow on the AHRC-funded Calling the Shots: Women and contemporary UK film culture at the University of Southampton
Natalie is widely published on inequalities in the creative industries, including her book Gender Inequality in Screenwriting Work (Palgrave Macmillan 2018). A key chapter of this: ‘That’s a Chick’s Movie!: How Women Are Excluded from Screenwriting Work’ was recently published in The Palgrave Handbook of Screenwriting Studies (2023).
Supervisors: Bridget Conor, Christina Scharff, and Rosalind Gill
Natalie collaborates with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Creative Diversity to try to affect change on both a policy and industry level. She was the lead researcher and author of Creative Majority (2021), which laid out ‘What Works’ to promote equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in the UK’s creative economy and co-wrote Making the Creative Majority (2023), which examines EDI in pathways into creative work through higher education. She co-authored Locked Down and Locked Out: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mothers working in the UK television industry with BECTU, Share My Telly Job and the University of Nottingham, and wrote the report “No One Left Behind: Identifying Film and Television Workers Most at Risk of Hardship as a Result of Covid-19” with Shelley Cobb for the UK Film and TV Charity. Natalie was the Research Fellow on the AHRC-funded Calling the Shots: Women and contemporary UK film culture at the University of Southampton
Natalie is widely published on inequalities in the creative industries, including her book Gender Inequality in Screenwriting Work (Palgrave Macmillan 2018). A key chapter of this: ‘That’s a Chick’s Movie!: How Women Are Excluded from Screenwriting Work’ was recently published in The Palgrave Handbook of Screenwriting Studies (2023).
Supervisors: Bridget Conor, Christina Scharff, and Rosalind Gill
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Books by Natalie L Wreyford
“This is an outstanding book, which unequivocally demonstrates the sexism still rife in the British film industry. Using a case detailed and engaging case study of screenwriting, the book punctures the ‘common sense’ of screenwriting, including the myths of meritocracy, the gendering of good taste, and the exclusion of motherhood. Beyond the richness of the empirical data, there is also an important theoretical contribution rethinking Bourdieu and gender for the study of creative industries. The book will act as a call to arms for those fighting for change, and the data and excellent analysis should shame those standing in the way.” (Dave O’Brien, The University of Edinburgh, Scotland)
“As a female screenwriter I’d like to applaud and thank Natalie Wreyford for writing this book. For too long, we’ve been told we’re exaggerating the problem and there is no real gender disparity in our industry. ... Now Natalie has proved by meticulous research that this inequality is a reality and part of a systematic problem that needs addressing and changing. Women’s stories have been neglected for too long. By talking to women writers, listening to them, advocating for them, Natalie has given us voice. Most crucially, she points to a way forward for real change. Every producer, executive, commissioner, and financier should be given a copy to read, then act on. Time is most definitely up. “ (Andrea Gibb, screenwriter and Co-Chair of the Film Committee at The Writer’s Guild of GB, UK)
Papers by Natalie L Wreyford
“This is an outstanding book, which unequivocally demonstrates the sexism still rife in the British film industry. Using a case detailed and engaging case study of screenwriting, the book punctures the ‘common sense’ of screenwriting, including the myths of meritocracy, the gendering of good taste, and the exclusion of motherhood. Beyond the richness of the empirical data, there is also an important theoretical contribution rethinking Bourdieu and gender for the study of creative industries. The book will act as a call to arms for those fighting for change, and the data and excellent analysis should shame those standing in the way.” (Dave O’Brien, The University of Edinburgh, Scotland)
“As a female screenwriter I’d like to applaud and thank Natalie Wreyford for writing this book. For too long, we’ve been told we’re exaggerating the problem and there is no real gender disparity in our industry. ... Now Natalie has proved by meticulous research that this inequality is a reality and part of a systematic problem that needs addressing and changing. Women’s stories have been neglected for too long. By talking to women writers, listening to them, advocating for them, Natalie has given us voice. Most crucially, she points to a way forward for real change. Every producer, executive, commissioner, and financier should be given a copy to read, then act on. Time is most definitely up. “ (Andrea Gibb, screenwriter and Co-Chair of the Film Committee at The Writer’s Guild of GB, UK)
This paper examines some of the key ways in which the complexities of doing qualitative research as an ‘insider’ (Acker, 2001) both enhanced and problematized the research process. The interview - so widely used by the film industry and the academy in a variety of situations including as part of a creative process and in identifying suitable candidates for employment - became an active site where restrictions on who could occupy the role of ‘screenwriter’ were discursively reawakened but I was required to bite my activist tongue and play the role of the impartial academic researcher. I also found myself doing gendered emotional work (Hochschild, 1983) that had notable parallels with the work I had previously done as a development executive. In this paper I will consider the feelings of discomfort, disillusionment and deception that I experienced as I sought a deeper understanding of hitherto hidden ways in which gender inequality happens in the UK film industry.
This paper will use the above data as context for case studies of some of the women of colour working in these roles in British film production. Looking at the overall career trajectories and with some reference to interviews conducted by Calling the Shots, we seek to foreground the work that black women do in the industry and to raise the profile of women working in less high-profile roles beyond the director. In addition, we consider patterns of employment and collaboration along race and gender lines, and when and how these identity markers appear most significant in securing work (or not) for black women. We analyse the sort of films that black women work on, particularly in regards to country of origin and budget level and show the possibilities of our dataset for monitoring the inclusion of black women in the UK film production sector. With the African American Film Critics Association declaring 2016 a “bonanza year” for black cinema (Scott), we argue that it is important to ensure that black women are taking up positions off-screen as well as on.