Definition
Intersectionality is the principle that a person's social identities — such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability — do not operate separately but interlock to shape how they experience the world. The term was introduced by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s.
Its central claim is that systems of advantage and disadvantage overlap. A single-category analysis — looking only at gender, or only at race — can miss the specific situation of people who sit at the intersection of several categories at once.
Why it matters
How it works
Intersectionality treats identity categories as interacting variables rather than additive ones. The experience of, for example, a working-class woman of a minority background is not simply the sum of three separate disadvantages; the combination can produce barriers invisible to analyses that consider each factor alone. Historically, this lens helps explain why movements organized around one axis — labor rights, racial equality, women's suffrage — sometimes overlooked members who belonged to several disadvantaged groups. Applied to policy, it pushes for solutions tested against the people facing the most overlapping obstacles.