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Abstract

Intersectionality, or the interconnected nature of social identities that create overlapping systems of advantage and disadvantage, is a rapidly expanding field of interest in the social sciences. However, there has been limited application of intersectionality to practical solutions regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace. In this article, we outline some common DEI challenges that organizations often try to address (e.g., harmful negative stereotypes of minoritized groups), discussing how intersectionality makes these challenges more nuanced. We then consider proven DEI initiatives and policies (e.g., data gathering and DEI goal transparency) and articulate how an intersectional lens can increase their effectiveness. We include broad recommendations for integrating intersectionality into DEI interventions.

Keywords

intersectionality diversity equity inclusion policies organizational climate

Social Media

Attending to intersectionality (how multiple identities jointly influence experiences and discrimination) when developing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) interventions can help make these initiatives more inclusive and effective. (236/280 characters)

Key Points

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives primarily focus on addressing inequalities along a singular identity axis.

Many issues that DEI initiatives aim to fix, including attempting to reduce stereotypes people hold and differential treatment based on group memberships, become more complicated when multiple identities are examined.

Intersectionality, or the notion that multiple identities influence people's experiences, perceptions, and discrimination, can help make DEI initiatives more inclusive and effective. However, leaders and policymakers might not be aware of the benefits of creating DEI interventions with intersectionality in mind.

Organizational leaders can be more attentive to intersectional concerns by noticing assumptions about who they consider typical of any demographic group and by weighing subgroups equally. For example, efforts to address concerns of “women” are often the concerns of White straight women, and when people imagine a “Black person”, they are more likely to imagine a man rather than a woman.

Instead of trying to manage identity concerns after they arise, organizational leaders can be preventative and create interventions that reduce the importance of identities to organizational outcomes before they can activate threat and negative feelings.

Finally, leaders should focus their efforts on addressing underlying (compared to surface-level) concerns, prioritizing issues of psychological safety and belonging that affect people with multiple identities.

Throughout American history, concerted efforts to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have fluctuated in intensity. For example, June 2020 marked a significant shift in people's attention to DEI. With the suffocation of George Floyd at the knee of a Minnesota police officer, there was an explosion of protests against police brutality and an increase in demands to tackle racial inequality. These demands went beyond race and included addressing interpersonal and structural inequalities between genders, sexual orientations, and religions. Companies began devoting billions of dollars to addressing disparities in society as well as within their organizations (Jung, 2021), while individuals focused on educating themselves on concepts such as bias, discrimination, and marginalization. In just a few years (2025), the climate around DEI has become notably chillier. Both individuals and organizations have begun an intense rollback of DEI initiatives. Words like “diversity”, “inequality”, “multicultural”, “discrimination”, and “bias” have been removed from government websites (Connelly, 2025), and there has been a marked increase in the sentiment that there was “too much focus on diversity” (Minkin, 2024), and many companies, fearing government retaliation, have pulled back on their commitments to DEI (Murray & Bohannon, 2025). Even places like Google, which was one of the first large corporations to have concrete DEI goals and a chief DEI officer, have eliminated many of their programs, including their DEI representation goals and identity-based career support groups (Cheung, 2025; Gold, 2025).

While the tide has seemingly turned against DEI, it remains a fact that a substantial proportion of Americans still believe focusing on DEI is a good thing (Minkin, 2024). In a rapidly diversifying world, ensuring that people with diverse backgrounds feel safe and included will only become more important, rather than less. Furthermore, the vast majority of companies have maintained or even increased their DEI monetary contributions (ParadigmIQ, 2025). In a time where DEI scrutiny is at an all-time high, organizational leaders are critically examining their DEI processes, assessing what is working and what is not, and pivoting to metrics that assess sustainability. Thus, developing interventions and best practices to deal with prejudice, discrimination, and bias in various spheres of public life is still paramount (Kalev et al., 2006). These initiatives to date, though, starting with the civil rights movement and through today, have primarily engaged with diversity and inclusion along a singular identity axis. In other words, DEI efforts primarily focus on race or gender or class rather than the intersections among these identities. Intersectionality (Cole, 2009; Collins, 2015) — the understanding that social hierarchies overlap to shape unique experiences of advantage and disadvantage at the intersection of multiple social identities—has not been well incorporated into interventions and policies aimed at addressing inequality within organizations (see Primecz & Mahadevan, 2025; Versey, 2021 for some recent examples).

The lack of consideration of intersectionality in organizational DEI interventions and best practices does not align with the scholarship on this topic. Starting with Kimberlé Crenshaw's (1989) seminal work “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics”, investigating intersectionality, both as a scholarly practice and as empirical theory, has proliferated in several adjacent academic fields, including psychology, sociology, political science, and law. There is substantial evidence illustrating that how marginalization, biased perception, and discrimination manifest in relation to one identity is fundamentally altered when considering additional identities (see Hudson et al., 2024, for a review of various intersectional empirical theories). An understanding of theory is helpful in providing abstract frameworks, but organizational leaders aiming to implement the most efficient and sustainable DEI policies would benefit from more concrete recommendations for the implementation of intersectionality in practice.

To illustrate why intersectionality is critical to DEI efforts, let us examine how identification with group membership is shaped by multiple identities. Conventional wisdom assumes that interventions designed to address barriers faced by “women” would be well-received by women regardless of other identities, like race or sexual orientation. However, scholars have identified patterns of self-identification that alter who one considers an ingroup member depending on which identities are highlighted (Roccas & Brewer, 2002). For example, Black women are more likely to see Black men as ingroup members over White women, even though both Black men and White women overlap with Black women on one identity dimension (Levin et al., 2002). These identity patterns may help explain why cues of organizational inclusion that increase belonging and sense of fairness for White women do not show similar benefits for Black women (Johnson & Pietri, 2024). As another example, identity salience can activate opposing stereotypes when those who have identities that carry conflicting stereotypes. For Asian women in technology, situations that activate racial salience might increase belonging (due to the stereotype that Asian people are excellent at STEM), whereas situations that activate gender salience might decrease it (due to the stereotype that women are not well suited for STEM fields; Shih et al., 1999). These findings and others have implications for how different racial subgroups of women might perceive organizational efforts to diversify along gender lines and potentially lead these efforts to be ineffective or even backfire, even if organizations aim to be inclusive. Thus, it behooves organizations to attend to intersectional dynamics when developing and testing interventions for DEI. And yet, there is very little guidance on how to do so.

In this paper, we make the case that problems of DEI in organizations require an intersectional approach. We first discuss commonly researched diversity and equity concerns (e.g., harmful negative stereotypes of minoritized individuals) that become more complex when including multiple identities. We then examine several interventions that are effective within organizations (e.g., transparency in DEI goals) and discuss how these interventions might not be as effective without considering intersectionality. Finally, inspired by Elizabeth Cole's framework for applying intersectionality to psychology (2009), we offer recommendations for organizational leaders who would like to account for intersectionality within their current practices. We also call for more research that attends to intersectional dynamics within organizations.

Biases at the Intersection of Identities

We outline several common groups of equity issues that minoritized individuals face in the workplace as well as in broader society, including harmful negative stereotypes that marginalize certain individuals, negative reactions toward minoritized individuals’ behaviors, and a lack of representation of minoritized people, especially in higher-status positions. These issues are often connected and are the targets for DEI interventions in part due to their ubiquitous presence and their impact on minoritized people's abilities to be recognized and promoted within organizations. Critically, each of these equity issues becomes more complex when other identities are made salient, making interventions less effective.

The first equity issue is the impact of harmful negative stereotypes about minoritized groups. Decades of research have shown that people assume women are warm and communal, thus unsuited for leadership, while men are perceived as agentic and assertive (Brescoll, 2016; Eagly et al., 2020; Eagly & Karau, 2002). Black people are stereotyped as unrefined and unintelligent (Ghavami & Peplau, 2013; Steele & Aronson, 1995), while Asian people are perceived as intelligent but unemotional and lacking creativity (Ghavami & Peplau, 2013; Lu, 2024). These broad societal stereotypes shape the expectations people have about the race and gender of leaders, such that ideal leaders are visualized as male as well as White (Eagly & Karau, 2002; Gündemir et al., 2014; Koenig et al., 2011; Petsko & Rosette, 2023). Given that stereotypes shape expectations and behaviors, stereotypes can in part explain why there has historically been little diverse representation in higher power positions.

Interventions focusing on addressing such biases in the workplace usually discuss stereotypes of “men” and “women”, or of “Asian”, “Black”, and “White” people, tacitly assuming that there are not meaningful differences in these stereotypes at the intersection of other identities (Hudson & Ghani, 2024). That assumption is contradicted by several research findings showcasing that gender stereotypes are drastically different at the intersection of race and sexual orientation, and stereotypes of racial groups depend on gender. For example, both Black women and Asian women are associated with different aspects of agency, with Black women being seen as more dominantly agentic, while Asian women are seen as more competently agentic (Rosette et al., 2016). Further, stereotypes that “women” are not agentic are primarily applied to White women. Indeed, Black women acting in dominant ways do not activate the same backlash that White women face (Livingston et al., 2012). In fact, Black men face backlash when engaging in dominant versus communal behaviors, which is dissonant with the normative stereotype that men should be assertive. Instead of being praised for dominant behaviors that are thought to be valuable for men, Black men must mitigate the influence of stereotypes related to their identity as Black (in this case, perceptions of being dangerous) by acting overly warm and appearing nonthreatening (Livingston & Pearce, 2009; Neel et al., 2013; Pedulla, 2014) to be successful in corporate spaces. Thus, when organizational leaders treat demographic groups as homogenous – rather than composed of multiple subgroups which, in and of themselves, diverge in how they are evaluated – they may create policies or implement practices that benefit part of the intended population (and might backfire for others). Thus, it is important for organizational leaders to carefully consider the needs of the various subgroups that make up each identity group, as well as to cultivate representation and feedback from each subgroup when making decisions.

A related barrier that many minoritized people in the workplace face revolves around perceptions of their competence, or lack thereof. Individuals in the numerical majority are often more readily presumed to be competent and brilliant compared to their minoritized peers (who are instead seen as having to work hard to be successful; Meyer et al., 2015). This bias has been shown to have a deleterious influence on relevant outcomes, such as leading managers to let majority group members bypass entrance exams or hiring tests (Rivera, 2016) or to require significantly less evidence to demonstrate their competence (Kobrynowicz & Biernat, 1997). However, stereotypes of competence and the consequences of such stereotypes change at the intersection of identities. Black women report having to “prove themselves” to be competent again and again in corporate settings more than their White, Asian, and Latina counterparts (Williams, 2014), and these women face larger penalties on perceived leader effectiveness when they fail (Rosette & Livingston, 2012). As another example, the assumption that men are seen as more competent and brilliant is mitigated and sometimes eliminated for queer and Black/Latinx men, whereas they are still present for straight, White, and Asian men (Hudson & Ghani, 2024; Mize, 2025). In fact, adults and children believe that Black women are more competent and brilliant than Black men (Jaxon et al., 2019; Mize, 2025). These findings collectively suggest that mitigating the impact of these stereotypes strongly depends on the group in question. Therefore, organizational leaders should be conscious of how they approach mitigating stereotypes of competence. For instance, in the case of a promotion, organizational leaders should not blanketly reward assertive behaviors, as not everyone can display assertive behaviors without repercussions. Instead, organizational leaders should precommit to using comprehensive metrics of objective competence rooted in performance directly tied to job scope and ensure that those markers are not inadvertently associated with stereotypes or cultural differences.

A second equity issue that minoritized individuals face within companies involves unequal expectations regarding the balance between work and family. Many women report feeling that their colleagues expect them to prioritize their family over their career, which can lead them to be overlooked for higher status roles that require greater time investment in the company (Van Der Lippe & Lippényi, 2020). This has historically been marked as the “motherhood penalty”, a dynamic that can both disadvantage women and advantage men. Due to this penalty, women receive lower starting salaries and even lower perceptions of competence because they have children (Correll et al., 2007). In contrast, men sometimes received a boost by being a parent, likely due to expectations of men being breadwinners and thus deserving of higher salaries.

However, expectations of work-family tradeoffs are evolving and are influenced by other identities like race and sexual orientation. For example, people expect straight women to be overly influenced by their partner's choices (e.g., moving because of a partner's job), increasing perceptions that they cannot be relied upon and thus are less competent than their male counterparts. In contrast, lesbian workers are not assumed to be as influenced by their partners’ choices, leading to an elimination of gender-based competence penalties (Niedlich et al., 2015). Recent work suggests there might no longer be a motherhood penalty or a fatherhood bonus for corporate employees (Petsko et al., 2025). Rather, there is a racialized boost such that White mothers and fathers are discriminated against less frequently (i.e., they were recommended more) compared to their Black colleagues. Relatedly, other research found that people associate paid work with being a “good mom” for Black mothers, but the absence of paid work as a marker of being a “good mom” for White mothers (Cuddy & Wolf, 2013). Thus, the societal belief that women who work have conflict with their family might be a White, straight woman phenomenon.

While we have discussed two broad classes of equity issues that plague minoritized people in organizations, it is important to note that there are many other equity challenges that organizations should try to combat, including pay inequities, workplace harassment, and a lack of mentorship. Each of these challenges is influenced by intersectionality. For example, for Black and Latina women, workplace harassment occurs as a function of their status as racialized women; in contrast, Black men may experience qualitatively different harassment as racialized men (Berdahl & Moore, 2006; Raver & Nishii, 2010). Thus, our broad assertion in this section is that organizational leaders may inadvertently exacerbate existing inequity issues (both relative advantages and disadvantages) when they do not consider intersectional identities in their DEI initiatives. In the following section, we aim to provide recommendations that will help leaders’ attempts to achieve equitable outcomes in the workplace.

Interventions and Policy Recommendations at the Intersection of Identities

DEI programs and trainings are a multibillion-dollar industry (Ellingrud et al., 2023). Companies spend money on initiatives that are not always effective or have minimal returns. Part of the issue is a focus on individual-level solutions to structural problems (Onyeador et al., 2021) and outsized attention on changing “attitudes” and “beliefs” rather than directly targeting behavioral change (Dasgupta, 2025). Importantly, there is a lack of attention to intersectional dynamics, which can sometimes result in these initiatives failing large portions of the groups they are purportedly designed to help. In this section, we discuss some common DEI interventions that are effective (Kalev et al., 2006) and suggest how these interventions can be enhanced by incorporating intersectionality.

One common intervention employed by organizations seeking to increase equity is identifying identity group disparities using data (such as employee pulse data) and making those results readily available for employees or other stakeholders. Some research has shown that transparency in these metrics (such as data on where companies are and where they are hoping to go) can lead to better effectiveness of these interventions (Castilla, 2015). Companies that publicly commit to DEI goals encourage managers to pay attention to their biases and actively work to prevent their biases from influencing procedures. However, simply because the data is collected does not mean that the conclusions drawn from said data lead to efficacious solutions. Many companies tend to set DEI goals and report demographic information by comparing within gender or within racial groups. Examining the data in this way can sometimes mask inequality or lead to erroneous solutions because the disparity can exist at the intersection of identities rather than within subgroups.

For example, economist Raj Chetty and colleagues examined social mobility at the intersection of race and gender. They report that regardless of what income percentile their parents were in, Black men did not achieve the same level of economic mobility as White men (Chetty et al., 2020). In contrast, there was no racial gap between Black and White women. If an organization wanted to address this supposedly apparent racial disparity that only occurs amongst men, they might focus their efforts primarily on the outcomes specifically of younger Black men. That conclusion would be a mistake, as a different story emerges when all four groups are compared simultaneously. In actuality, Black men, Black women, and White women all achieve similar levels of economic mobility as a function of their parents’ success; it is White men who show outsized success. Thus, collecting data and reporting only along single identity dimensions (e.g., men compared to women; Black employees compared to White employees) may conceal the true patterns of inequality present in an organization, especially when the inequality is rooted in privilege rather than disadvantage. A way organizational leaders can bypass this concern is by combining relative metrics (i.e., comparing Black men to White men) with objective metrics pegged to an external standard (i.e., what is an acceptable level of social mobility). By not only comparing groups to each other but also to an external standard, it becomes clearer where the disparity actually is and thus provides greater clarity to possible solutions.

Another recommendation we put forth is to consider which groups may benefit most from any given policy. For example, organizational leaders also must scrutinize their initiatives and policies that are meant to favor a broad group of people (e.g., people who are living with disabilities) but are actually only benefiting a subgroup (e.g., employees who use wheelchairs). To do so, they must recruit a broad and diverse swath of employees to offer input on these initiatives. Biases around who is seen as most representative occur when organizational leaders think of a subgroup as representing the larger group. For instance, when thinking of “women”, people tend to imagine straight, White women (rather than women who are queer or not White, as these dimensions are not prototypical). Similarly, when thinking of “Black people”, people might imagine Black men, rather than women or non-binary (as “male” is the assumed to be the default gender for Black people – therefore, it is the “prototype” of Black people); (Alt et al., 2020; Bailey et al., 2020; Devos & Banaji, 2005; Ghavami & Peplau, 2013; Hudson & Ghani, 2024; Petsko & Rosette, 2023). These prototypicality biases of androcentrism (assuming the default person is male), heterocentrism (assuming the default person is straight), and White-centrism (assuming the default person is White) are insidious and can shape what interventions are presumed to be effective and feasible.

The second common intervention that organizations prioritize is increasing the level of diversity in leadership. In part due to stereotypical expectations mentioned before, women and racial minorities are underrepresented in most higher-level positions within organizations. Until 2020, there were more male CEOs of Fortune 500 companies named “James” than there were women CEOs overall (Boyle & Green, 2023). In addition, while women make up half of the workforce, only about 29% of corporate C-suites comprise women leaders (Krivkovich et al., 2024). These numbers mask intersectional realities, as White and Asian women are significantly more likely to be represented in the higher-level positions than Black or Latina women (Krivkovich et al., 2024). Furthermore, increasing the representation of women and ethnic minorities at the top still does not address the gendered and racialized dynamics they are likely subjected to in their daily working lives. Minoritized individuals in the C-suite are caught at the uncomfortable intersection of their relatively high-status organizational role and their relatively low-status identities, especially when they are still in the numerical minority. Not only is such a space psychologically uncomfortable (Richeson & Ambady, 2001a), but it may make their marginalized identities more salient (McCluney & Rabelo, 2019), further entrenching the very attitudes and behaviors that led to disparities in representation in the first place (Dover et al., 2014; Richeson & Ambady, 2001b). Furthermore, because of negative stereotypes, minoritized people in higher power positions aren’t always able to act in accordance with their rank. As an example, increased power is associated with greater talking time but only for men (Brescoll, 2011). Women's power level is not related to how much they speak in meetings, because they are still aware of gendered stereotypes in the environment.

Thus, it is important to prevent tokenism and focus on changing organizational culture, not just representation. Organizational cultures can inadvertently perpetuate inequality when leaders avoid taking systemic action (Figueroa et al., 2025). In contrast, organizational leaders who implement systemic solutions often benefit from more effective outcomes. For example, consider Jack Rivkin, the late Wall Street investment firm leader, who famously increased the number of women in the equity research department he led by focusing on the big and small ways in which sexist culture prevailed (Groysberg & Ammerman, April 2021). This included removing talented people who harmed the culture of the organization (through ‘jerk’ behavior) and allowing his analyst team to achieve success in whatever way felt natural to them. In this way, he shifted organizational culture by amplifying and soliciting women's voices, simultaneously celebrating their differences while highlighting their similarities, and rejecting a one-size-fits-all model of leadership. Rivkin was successful in that he targeted representation goals and simultaneously tackled the toxic culture that led to representation gaps in the first place. The result of this initiative was an increase from 15% to 30% representation of women at the firm over five years, which was double the industry average.

A third common strategy that has gained much attention is the creation of safe and inclusive spaces specifically for those with minoritized identities. Women, as well as ethnic and sexual minorities, often feel that many public and organizational spaces are not welcoming to their identities (Davies et al., 2005; Emerson & Murphy, 2014; Fingerhut & Abdou, 2017), precipitating a lack of belonging (Cheryan et al., 2009). Cues to belonging, or the lack thereof, are often subtle, but can meaningfully impact perceptions of workplace inclusion. For example, masculine-coded paraphernalia on the walls of an office can send a signal to women that they are not welcome (Cheryan et al., 2009), whereas the inclusion of pronouns in an office email can signal that being queer is accepted (Johnson et al., 2021). Similarly, employee resource groups and affinity groups within organizations are effective ways of creating inclusive spaces (Welbourne et al., 2017). As mentioned before, though, the same cues that work for some minoritized people do not always work for others. For example, while Black and Latino men feel increased safety in work spaces that focus on “women's success” (e.g., companies that had won a “top company for women executives” awards) and White women feel increased safety in spaces that signal inclusion for racial minorities (e.g., companies that had won a “top company for Black executives” awards) (Chaney et al., 2016), these “stigma transfer cues” aren’t as effective for Black women (Johnson & Pietri, 2024).

To increase the intersectional applicability of employee resource groups for specific identities and other identity-safety cues, organizations should “focus on the underlying similarities” between marginalized groups (Cole, 2009; Stevens et al., 2008) and reduce the systematic barriers that result in identities being marginalized in the first place. For example, gender neutral bathrooms reduce the salience of gender for transgender individuals because they are not forced to choose a restroom based on their gender identity versus their sex assigned at birth. Reducing the frequency that one must confront a stigmatized identity in the workplace has implications, as it leads not only sexual minorities to feel there is more fairness in the policies and procedures within their company (the presumed target of the intervention) but also influences women's and ethnic minorities’ perceptions of fairness (Chaney & Sanchez, 2018) and may also have positive effects for the psychological safety of majority group employees (Figueroa et al., 2024).

Researchers posit that this safety cue is so broadly applicable because of a widespread belief that prejudice is generalized (Akrami et al., 2011), meaning that if people and organizations exhibit prejudice towards one marginalized group, they likely will exhibit prejudice against other marginalized groups. In other words, inclusive signals towards one group suggest that the organization, overall, is less prejudiced towards all groups. An intersectional take offers another possibility, which is that gender neutral bathrooms are often single-stall bathrooms. A design that minimizes social dynamics by reducing the relationship between a common daily occurrence (using the restroom) and one's social identities can increase feelings of safety broadly. For example, reducing the necessary relationship between gender and the bathroom could benefit fathers who need to take their female children to the bathroom, people with “invisible” disabilities who feel stigmatized going into designated “handicapped bathrooms”, or individuals experiencing heavy menstruation. Thus, gender-neutral bathroom helps address an underlying symptom of several different groups’ feelings about a lack of inclusion in public spaces.

Conclusion

Diversity initiatives have had mixed influence on increasing belonging and inclusion within organizations. We posit that part of the problem is a lack of intersectional awareness in the creation and assessment of DEI initiatives. Thus, we encourage researchers and organizational leaders to attend to intersectionality when creating and assessing DEI interventions.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Sa-kiera Tiarra Jolynn Hudson

Alexandra Figueroa

Merrick Osborne

Ryan F. Lei

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Taking an Intersectional Approach to Diversity,Equity,and Inclusion Interventions and Policies

Abstract

Keywords

Social Media

Key Points

Biases at the Intersection of Identities

Interventions and Policy Recommendations at the Intersection of Identities

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

References