Feminist economics are intersectional

Meanwhile, intersectionality theory has been proceeding from its roots in legal studies, beginning with Kimberle Crenshaw’s defining article in which she coined the term “intersectionality” to describe how black women could be discriminated against as black women rather than as a sum of discrimination against women and discrimination against blacks. The term has gone on to be widely used both in academic circles and by activists seeking to end disparities. While the concept of intersectionality has not been widely noted by standard economists, other than the occasional use of interaction terms in empirical analyses, feminist economists have argued for use of an intersectional approach to economic research in much of their writings.

Feminist economists have also been more likely the other economists to emphasize the intersectionality of gender disparities with other forms of labor market disparities. The compounding burdens of age discrimination and race and ethnicity and caste discrimination need not be simply additive but can be more interrelated, possibly even multiplicative. For example, the wage penalty associated with being a disabled African-American woman may not be the sum of the penalties for being African-America, being disabled, and being a woman. Feminist economists have also tried to explicate more fully the reason why gender intersects with other factors and leads to disparities, using bargaining theory to consider why the layers of gender with other factors such as ethnicity, race, and immigrant status can reduce a person’s relative status as each part increasingly weakens their relative standing in relation to those in the majority or stronger or more powerful group. Race and ethnicity have been two of the main areas of overlap with gender that feminist economists have specifical considered, both by comparing racial inequality to gender inequality to bring out both similarities and differences, and increasingly by considering their intersectional nature. Feminist economists have generally argued that it is important to consider all dimensions of inequality that interact with gender rather than solely focusing on gender in their studies. This includes a strong consciousness of how class and immigrant status also interact both with each other and with race, ethnicity, and gender. The focus of feminist economists on the importance of using multiple methods in empirical research, including using interviews to bring out narratives of overlapping inequalities, allows for theses more nuanced approaches in tandem with analyzing the numerical inequalities in areas such as pay and participation in paid labor by different overlapping demographic categories.