Why Exploring the Effects of Intersectionality is Imperative?

Intersectionality, a concept developed in 1989 by Black feminist academic Kimberlé Crenshaw, is an analytic framework that describes how aspects of one’s identity such as race, gender, class, and other factors intersect to compound both marginalization and privilege.

She aimed to analyse how the different facets of a person’s identity can be discriminated against or in favour of, giving rise to an increasingly unfair and unlevelled playing field, and provide a more accurate analysis of how different people are treated differently and how that plays out in the big picture of the society, and by proxy, the economy as a whole.

For every dollar that a white man in the United States earns, a white woman earns 81 cents, while Hispanic, African American, American Indian, and Alaskan Native women earn 75 cents. Even when we ignore the abhorrence that is the gender pay disparity that is rampant everywhere, and speak purely in economic terms, a lower income leads to lower spending, which leads to lower demand, which means lower profits which would lead to lower supply and ultimately, lower employment.

And guess who is the most vulnerable to company downsizing in the event of a recession? Unsurprisingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Black women were twice as likely to report that they were laid off, furloughed, or had their hours or pay reduced as compared to white men.

The closest that we have come to exploring it on an economic level is Stratification Economics, coined by Prof. William Darity Jr. in 2005, which draws on the identification individuals have with social groups to explain how their behaviour reflects the interests of their social groups, leading individuals to be representative agents for them.

It took a detour from mainstream economics to include the disparity in the way people are treated in an economy on the basis of several inherent factors that they often have little to no control over. It was a revolutionary field in that it addressed several underlying issues that affected several problems explored in economics such as income and employment.

However, exploring the overlap of identities such as socioeconomic conditions and race/gender was about as close as it came to actually addressing the problem of disparity arising from intersectionality. According to recent statistics, Gen Z is the most diverse generation yet and we are or are soon going to be active contributors of the economy.

So, what challenges would an immigrant gay trans woman of colour coming from lower socioeconomic conditions face and how the collective ripple effect of these disparities arising from intersectionality would affect the economy are both questions that need to be answered and problems that need solutions. Otherwise, not only are we failing as humans at giving people their due credit and respect, along with the opportunities that they deserve, not only are we failing at holding people in power accountable and putting less competent if not completely incompetent (read: the President of the United States of America from 2016 to 2020 over Democratic Candidate Hilary Clinton) people on pedestals based on certain factors that they have no contribution in, but we are also robbing ourselves of untapped potential and talent and holding back from the possibility of economic development and leading ourselves towards inevitable economic and social doom.