LGBTQ+ carers in UK universities: policy problems and personalized inequalities

This paper focuses on LGBTQ+ carers in UK universities and explores how policy problems become personalized. While equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policies increasingly anticipate LGBTQ+ presence, they often individualize systemic issues. Recognition in care policy may offer symbolic visibility, yet interviewees are routinely expected to embody and enact care themselves – absorbing institutional responsibilities informally and at personal cost. Workers are positioned as ‘caring people’ who stand in for policy, even as their own diverse care responsibilities – often outside heteronormative, child-focused models – are sidelined. Individuals become the evidence of institutional care, masking policy failure and reinforcing the very inequalities such frameworks claim to address. This cycle exemplifies how liberal policy solutions obscure structural injustice by relying on personal goodwill in ‘understanding’ line managers, or the ‘passionate’, caring queer worker. Interrupting the personalization of policy is essential to addressing the enduring gaps between institutional intention and lived inequality.