The Concept of Intersectionality

Intersectionality seeks to understand how forms of oppression and discrimination intersect in ways that reinforce each other. Someone who is a black woman, for example, is not just black and not just a woman from the perspective of others in her society or from the standpoint of how she understands her life experiences. Rather, her experience can only be understood by considering how her race and sex together affect how she is seen and treated by others.

The discrimination she is wrongly subject to based on her race intersects with the wrongful discrimination she experiences based on her sex. If she is discriminated against because she is a black woman and then wants to pursue legal remedies, existing laws related to discrimination on the basis of single variables are often inadequate to the task. Other forms of disadvantage, such as being gay in a society that is strongly homophobic or being an undocumented migrant, add to the complexities of personal identity and experiences of discrimination.

Without the concept of intersectionality, we would not be able to name or to theorize about the multiple forms of disadvantage that some individuals face in society. Intersectionality as a concept reveals something that is highly relevant to understanding organizational diversity: human experience cannot be neatly categorized on the basis of any one personal attribute or characteristic. There are many ways of categorizing how individuals differ in ways that lead to discrimination and disparate outcomes.