If You Don’t Understand Intersectionality, You Don’t Actually Understand Diversity.
We are so much more than one identity
An international organization employed a step-wise approach to diversity: women first, then minorities, and then, well…there wasn’t any plan after that.
Employees were pushing for more inclusion, but leadership figured everyone has a gender and a race, so those categories should cover everyone. Why were employees concerned about people falling through the cracks?
Exploring identities
To understand the employees’ concerns, we need to remember that each of us has many identities. Take a look at the image below and write down a few of your identities. You might even include some that are important to you but not in this image.
As soon as you picked more than one identity, you demonstrated a grasp of intersectionality. If you have a sense that different combinations of identities lead to different experiences in the world, you’re ahead of the game.
For every identity we hold, there are advantages (privileges) and disadvantages that come with that identity. It’s easy to imagine the advantages of higher income, social class, and holding leadership roles within an organization.
The advantages and disadvantages of our other identities are not always apparent to us, so one way to explore this is to consider who holds power in our country. We can look at members of Congress or the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, for example. While we don’t have data on all the social identities listed above, we have data for gender, race, and sometimes military experience, education level, or age. This data can tell us which identities are advantaged in society. I like to use “one-up” and “one-down” to describe this phenomenon.
If most of our identities are one-up identities, we experience fewer barriers to inclusion. When we hold one-down identities, we experience more barriers to inclusion, which can add up to more than the sum of their parts. Black women, for example, face a combination of racism and sexism different from the biases that Black men or White women experience. As the number of one-down identities we hold increases, so do the barriers we face on a daily basis.
Case Studies
Let’s imagine two women. As you read through their profiles, identify which of their identities are one-up and which are one-down.
Nancy is a college-educated white woman in her fifties, widowed, with adult children who have left the nest. She is in a good financial position due to her earnings and her husband’s generous life insurance policy. She has some care-taking duties for her parents, who live nearby, but they are able to afford in-home care for most of their needs. She has certainly faced obstacles due to her gender, but she played sports growing up and knows how to handle a tough crowd. She is in senior leadership and feels fortunate to have a boss who supports her fully. In fact, he saw her potential when nobody else did, and she flourished when finally given the opportunity.
Now let’s imagine Wei, who recently immigrated from Singapore. She is married, in her thirties, has an advanced degree, and has two young children. Although her English is excellent, it takes effort to speak and write in a language that is not native to her, and she spends extra time reviewing her writing to make sure she hasn’t made any errors. Because of anti-Asian sentiment and violence in her town, she feels anxious whenever she has to leave the house. Her family is here on her husband’s H1B visa, and she worries about what might happen if he loses his job. She hopes to become a manager within the next few years. Meanwhile, she avoids self-promotion because she knows her hard work speaks for itself.
Notice the richness and complexity of each woman’s identities. How many one-up and one-down identities can you name for each woman? Who do you think experiences more barriers to inclusion in the workplace? Would we be able to fully understand the specific barriers to inclusion each woman faces without using an intersectional lens?
A thought experiment
Intersectionality is important when looking at groups as well as individuals. And because so many of us have been trained to think diversity only means gender and race, it can be easy to miss the full dimensions of diversity when looking at groups. Take a look at the illustration below. Which group do you think is more diverse?
From this image, it’s easy to conclude that Group 1, at 30% female, is more diverse than Group 2, at 90% female. But what if we look at other identities of the individuals in this group? Let’s begin with race.
Although the groups contain roughly equal numbers of minorities, Group 1 includes no minority women or dark-skinned people. Did you know that colorism, the preference for lighter skin, is often overlooked, even when discussing race?
Let’s see what happens when we look at LGBTQ+ status.
Now we see that there are no LGBTQ+ people in Group 1, while Group 1 consists of 40% of LGBTQ+ people who are represented in purple, dark blue, and teal. We can also see that our original assumption that the group was 90% female completely erased the existence of the nonbinary person, rendered in teal in this illustration.
Suppose we had only looked at gender or race when considering these groups. In that case, we could have easily singled out Group 2 for being less diverse than Group 1. We would have missed the presence of women of color, dark-skinned people, and LGBTQ+ people in Group 2.
In a thought experiment like this, the stakes are low. But can you imagine the gaps that form when you design your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies based on gender and race alone?
Intersectionality and DEI
In practice, DEI strategies primarily benefit White women, and even when DEI strategies include race, Black and Latino employees are often left behind. Why is this so?
When we think of women, we tend to create a “universal” woman who is one-up in the rest of her identities. She is white, middle or upper class, straight, cisgender, and so on.
When we think of racial minorities, we tend to create a “universal” minority who is one-up in the rest of his identities. He is male, cisgender, straight, able-bodied, light-skinned, and so on.
These unconscious templates inform how we design our DEI strategies and programming and who we design them for.
When everyone else falls through the cracks — working mothers, minority women, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ people, among others — it is because our DEI strategies are functioning exactly how they were designed.
When everyone else falls through the cracks, it is because our DEI strategies are functioning exactly how they were designed.
Diversity strategies based on gender and race alone fail to support employees who do not fall within a narrow template. To create inclusion for everyone, we must take an intersectional lens to our DEI strategies, and we must continue to ask ourselves who might be left out of our current programming.
Conclusions
It takes far more than a solid understanding of intersectionality to achieve effective DEI goals, but without this foundation, the rest of the work will be misguided at best.
To holistically address the multiple identities that people hold, businesses must measure and disaggregate data to define the organization’s current state. Critical data includes pay equity, professional development opportunities, hiring, promotion, workplace harassment, and turnover rates. Qualitative data on employee engagement and feelings of belonging is also essential. The data should be disaggregated by gender, race, LGBTQ+ status, physical disability, parental status, and religion, among others.
In addition to data-driven approaches, we must engage in intercultural competency development. Many of us were raised to seek out and honor the common humanity of all people, but paradoxically, that can prevent us from seeing the ways our organizations systematically advantage and disadvantage people based on their identities. As Marcel Proust writes,
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
This data and intercultural competency development will help you identify which groups are most impacted by the current system, enabling you to develop informed, targeted strategies as intersectional as the people in your organization.
Kai Stowers, Coach and Consultant in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Kai Stowers is a consultant, Professional Certified Coach (PCC), and has a master’s degree in Organizational Psychology and Change Leadership from Columbia University. He partners with organizations to help leaders build high-performing, engaged, and inclusive teams. Learn more at kaistowers.com.
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