Intersectionality

arrow coming together, age, race, sex, geographic location, gender, socio-economic Intersectionality describes overlapping or interdependent systems of discrimination related to age, disabilities, ethnicity, gender, geographic location, sex, socioeconomic status, sexuality, etc.

Researchers and engineers should not consider gender in isolation. Gender identities, norms and relations shape and are shaped by other social attributes (Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018).

In 1989, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to describe how multiple forms of discrimination, power, and privilege intersect in Black women’s lives, in ways that are erased when sexism and racism are treated separately (Crenshaw, 1989). Since then, the term has been expanded to describe intersecting forms of oppression and inequality emerging from structural advantages and disadvantages that shape a person's or a group's experience and social opportunities (Hankivsky, 2014; Collins & Bilge, 2020; McKinzie & Richards, 2019; Rice et al., 2019).

Axes of discrimination differ by culture, these may include:

Age/Life Stage
Disabilities
Educational Background
Ethnicity
Family Configuration
Gender
Geographic Location
Handedness
Language
Race
Religious culture
Sex
Sexual Orientation
Social and Economic Status(SES)
Sustainability

…and many others

Works Cited

Buolamwini, J., & Gebru, T. (2018). Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, 81, 77-91.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, University of Chicago Legal Forum Vol. no. 1, 139-167.

Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2020). Intersectionality. John Wiley & Sons.

Hankivsky, O. (2014). Intersectionality 101 (The Institute for Intersectionality Research & Policy, SFU).

McKinzie, A, Richards, P. (2019). An Argument for Context-Driven Intersectionality. Sociology Compass. 2019;13e12671.

Rice, C., Harrison, E., & Friedman, M. (2019). Doing Justice to Intersectionality in Research. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 1532708619829779.

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