Creating an intersectional hiring strategy

Intersectionality is a powerful concept for DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) practitioners, and teams committed to welcoming more backgrounds and identities into their workforces. As we’ll soon see, understanding intersectional hiring can provide a lens showing that DEI is more than one-dimensional.

What is intersectionality?

Intersectionality is the idea that people can have multiple social identities, which can overlap to give them unique experiences in the world. Intersectionality as a framework is used to look at how these overlaps can create obstacles which wouldn’t be recognised with conventional ways of thinking.

To illustrate this, let’s look at an example. If we were to consider three different identities: women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and people of colour, we can consider these independently.

Many DEI programs do, and will craft initiatives to focus on fostering opportunities for each of those identified groups, separately. However, this approach is one-dimensional, and can miss nuance.

Intersectionality is all about understanding that these identities can overlap.

A white woman and a Black woman might have very different experiences in the workspace. A gay Black woman may face different challenges to a Black woman.

Now before we go any further, I need to make the following clear: Intersectionality is not about adding up different types of inequality. It is not about comparisons, nor is it about building a hierarchy of inequalities. Unfortunately, intersectionality has seen pushback – with many being concerned that it seeks to establish a new hierarchy of power (or victimhood), but this is taking the framework out of context.

A brief history of intersectionality

Kimberlé Crenshaw is a Professor at Columbia University, who has spent the past 30 years studying civil rights, race, and racism. In the 1989, she coined the term to describe double discrimination and racism faced by black women.

Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white women’s experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet often they experience double discrimination—the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as Black women—not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as Black women.

Crenshaw, KimberlÉ (1989)

One example of this, which inspired much of Kimberlé’s research, was a court case from 1976 (DeGraffenreid v. General Motors). In this case, 5 Black women sued General Motors for a policy which in their eyes, targeted black women exclusively.

In 1964, the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was introduced, which prohibited employers from discriminating against race, colour, religion, sex and national origin. Before 1964, General Motors did not hire Black women. During a recession in the early 1970s, General Motor’s redundancy policy meant that all Black women hired after 1964 were laid off. That policy didn’t fall under the protection of the Civil Rights Act, since it didn’t fall under just race or just gender discrimination.

When the case was taken to court, the court decided that trying to pull together both racial and sex discrimination claims would be unworkable. Crenshaw argued that by treating the Black women as only women or only Black, as they did in 1976, the courts had repeatedly ignored the challenges faced by Black women as a group.

Although originally, intersectionality was used to describe the overlap of race and gender, it has been expanded to include the intersections of other social categories. Some of these categories include disability, sexual orientation, occupation, socio-economic disadvantage, and other life experiences.

How does intersectionality affect the workplace?

Affinity groups: Employees from marginalised groups might not feel fully represented in support groups. For example, a Black employee from a low-income background might feel isolated in a Black affinity group that doesn’t address socio-economic issues.

Bias in hiring tools: Automated hiring tools can disadvantage candidates based on intersecting identities. Many employers believe that automated AI can reduce bias and promote diversity, but this can sometimes backfire. For example, in 2023 Workday faced a class-action lawsuit after allegations that their AI was biased against Black, disabled, over-40 candidates. We’ve discussed biased AI before on this blog.

Misguided diversity attempts: Some companies establish internship programs for Historically Black Colleges/Universities (HBCU)s. One such tech company created courses for a university, however did not sponsor the expenses. This meant that some students needed to take out additional loans to cover the expenses. In the US, 65% of the 17 million Black workers don’t come from a university background. Hence this internship program didn’t account for the intersectionality between Black workers and socio-economic disadvantages.

As these examples demonstrate, genuine attempts at creating positive change can fall short if considering looked at in one dimension.

What is an intersectional hiring strategy?

If we take a simplified look at a hiring pipeline, we can see different opportunities for building an intersectional hiring process. At the mouth of the “funnel”, we have the employer branding and sourcing efforts. Next you have screening, then assessments, followed by onboarding. Surrounding this is continuous improvements and tweaks to your process, driven by reporting and feedback. Let’s take a look at each.

Sourcing / Employer branding

1. Focus on essential qualifications – someone’s socio-economic background heavily influences if they’ll get a degree. If it isn’t essential to have an educational qualification, drop it. Read more.
2. Reach out to specific organisations – different organisations can represent and help you connect with different identity groups. Some of these organisations represent intersectional groups, for example Black Girls in Tech and Lesbians Who Tech.
3. Build authentic relationships – Build relationships and strategic partnerships with communities representing marginalised groups. Demonstrate your commitments on your careers site, and show applicants who they’re joining.
4. Offer inclusive skills-building paths – You could offer tuition reimbursement, scholarships or paid training opportunities. Ask yourself – what transferrable skills should we look for in people seeking to access our industry?

Screening

1. Adopt anonymised hiring – Anonymised hiring can significantly reduce unconscious bias at the screening stage, removing barriers for marginalised groups.
2. Ensure automated tools are supervised – AI screening tools should never have the final say on an application, if you don’t fully control, understand and audit its training data.

Intersectional Hiring Assessments

1. Diverse interview panels – To help mitigate unconscious biases, ensure your interview panel members come from a diverse range of backgrounds.
2. Scorecard hiring – Use scorecards against pre-decided desirable traits and measure every candidate objectively against those criteria. Objective decision-making can reduce unconscious bias.

Onboarding

1. Explain accommodations and support – during the onboarding process, make sure that new joiners are aware of employee resource groups, affinity groups and any other accommodations and support you offer. If intersectional support exists, make sure you highlight this.

Continuous improvement / reporting

1. Intersectional data – When reviewing your DEI reports, ensure you look beyond just one category at a time. Break these categories out into more nuanced groups, which will help you identify any gaps.

Benefits of embracing intersectional hiring

Demonstrating that your company understands and supports intersectional groups can have profound impacts. Edgardo Perez – at the time the director of recruitment, inclusion and culture at Abstract, wrote about the impacts his business saw when taking an intersectional hiring approach.

Their job applications tripled, and candidates increasingly referred to inclusion as their reason for applying.

And, in just eight months of focused effort, we tripled our population of women of color to almost 20% of employees — huge strides for a company our size. All other employee demographics for the representation of women (43%), African American and Latinx people (29%) grew by nearly 10 percentage points, a hefty increase. LGBTQ+ people continue to represent 14% of the company. Our new employees brought in more perspectives on how to improve our hiring and onboarding processes.

EDGARDO PEREZ (2021)

He’s written an excellent article describing Abstract’s approach to intersectionality.

Intersectional hiring: your new lens

By bringing together different identities, we gain a perspective of the different challenges and barriers some people experience. This perspective gives us intersectional hiring – strategies which help us identify groups and improvements which a single dimension approach would miss.

The benefits are clear: increased representation, higher feelings of inclusivity and belonging, and an industry-leading approach to DE&I.