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Tag: Intersectionality

  • The Routledge International Handbook of Gender-Based Violence Research

    The Routledge International Handbook of Gender-Based Violence Research

    Borda-Niño-Wildman (2025) provides a comprehensive handbook to guide scholars, educators, and policymakers through GBV research. The volumne offers practical tools and critical reflections needed across every phase of study, from initial conceptualization and fieldwork through to final dissemination and real-world impact. Drawing on contributions from leading scholars and practitioners, the text examines how researchers formulate, design and carry out projects within shifting knowledge landscapes by focusing on the interconnected epistemological, methodological, and ethical dimensions of gender-based violence inquiry. Taking into consideration global fieldwork experiences, it highlights both the urgent questions investigators face nd the creative strategies they deploy across this complex field.

    The handbook covers a broad spectrum of conceptual, empirical and practical topics. These include applying intersectional lenses to neurodiversity and academic power dynamics, examining gender-based violence within conceptual debates about gender itself, and treating GBV as both an analytical framework and an observable reality. Contributors also evaluate the opprotunities and obstacles of conducting feminist research, the epistemological violence involved in studying abuse against transgender-identified individuals, and GBV within university setting swhere researchers frequently navigate the triple roles of researching, teaching, and providing pastoral support.

    Methodological discussions address feminist research ethics, research designs capable of examining silence, the dilemas of including perpetrators in studies, and the use of digital media to investigate violence across expanding online environments. Furthemore, the volume explores the capacity and limits of quantitative data to uncover historically overlooked forms of abuse, the implications of conductiong cross-national surveys linked to policy and advocacy, an dinnovative arst-based research methods. Finally, the collection addresses intersectional fieldworks, explores advocacy dilemmas within third-sector organizations, and shows how social theory serves as a transformative tool for analysis and practice.

    Learn more about this book here:

    Borda-Niño-Wildman, C. (2025). The Routledge International Handbook of Gender-Based Violence Research (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032632063

  • A tutorial for conducting intersectional multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy (MAIHDA)

    A tutorial for conducting intersectional multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy (MAIHDA)

    How can researchers better measure overlapping social inequalities? Evans et al. (2024) offer an accessible tutorial on I-MAIHDA, a multilevel approach designed to examine health, social, and economic disparities across intersecting groups.

    Intersectional multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy (I-MAIHDA) is an innovative approach for investigating inequalities across health, disease, psychosocial, and socioeconomic outcomes. Evans et al. explain that I-MAIHDA and related methods offer clear conceptual and practical advantages over standard single-level regression models. By helping researchers examine how multiple, interlocking systems of marginalization and oppression produce inequalities—and by overcoming the typical challenges of analyzing interactions—it serves as a valuable tool for social epidemiology, health psychology, precision medicine, public health, and environmental justice. The method allows researchers to estimate average differences between intersectional groups, evaluate interaction effects in detail, and separate individual variation into differences within groups and between groups.

    Because of the lack of practical guidance on running and interpreting MAIHDA models across different studies, Evans et al. bring this knowledge together into a clear conceptual and practical guide for both continuous and binary outcomes. While they focus on I-MAIHDA, the tutorial also sheds light on related methods, such as multicategorical MAIHDA used in clinical research. To help researchers run their own models or understand the concepts, the authors offer step-by-step guidance alongside a practical example using simulated health data, providing all data and code so readers can replicate the analyses.

    Learn more about this article here:

    Evans, C. R., Leckie, G., Subramanian, S. V., Bell, A., & Merlo, J. (2024). A tutorial for conducting intersectional multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy (MAIHDA). SSM – Population Health, 26, 101664. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2024.101664

  • A Union of Equality: Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025

    A Union of Equality: Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025

    How can the European Union achieve true equality across its member states? The European Commission (2020) outlines its 2020–2025 strategy to eliminate gender-based violence, structural inequality, and persistent gaps in pay and power.

    As the European Commission (2020) explains, promoting equality between women and men is required by EU Treaties, standing as a core value, a fundamental right, and a central principle of the European Pillar of Social Rights. Equal participation is also essential for a competitive, innovative, and thriving economy, bringing more jobs and higher productivity to help Europe navigate the green and digital transitions as well as demographic challenges. While the EU is a global leader in this area—holding 14 of the world’s top 20 spots for gender equality thanks to strong equal treatment laws and mainstreaming efforts—no member state has reached full equality. Progress remains slow, with the average EU Gender Equality Index score rising just 5.4 points from 2005 to reach 67.4 out of 100 in 2019.

    The Commission emphasizes that advances in gender equality are neither inevitable nor permanent. While the gap in education is closing, deep divisions remain in employment, earnings, caregiving, political power, and pensions. In addition, gender-based violence, harassment, and sexist hate speech continue at alarming rates, alongside resistance to dismantling gender stereotypes.

    To confront these issues, the 2020–2025 strategy outlines concrete policy goals and actions to build an EU where discrimination, violence, and structural barriers are removed, allowing women and men in all their diversity to have equal chances to lead and thrive.

    Learn more about this policy strategy here:

    European Commission. (2020). A Union of Equality: Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025 (COM(2020) 152 final) https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52020DC0152

  • Gender, race, and political ambition: how intersectionality and frames influence interest in political office

    Gender, race, and political ambition: how intersectionality and frames influence interest in political office

    How do explanations for women’s underrepresentation shape their desire to run for office? Holman and Schneider (2018) show that framing the issue as supply versus demand changes women’s political ambition, with key differences across racial groups.

    Men continue to dominate political institutions in the United States. Media and academic discussions often focus on two types of obstacles that lower women’s representation: demand factors, such as political parties and elite networks, and supply factors, such as women’s self-confidence and political interest. Still, little is known about whether these narratives affect women’s ambition to run for office, or how they influence women of color.

    Holman and Schneider demonstrate that attributing women’s underrepresentation to supply versus demand causes clear changes in political ambition. When the lack of parity is blamed on demand factors, white and Asian women can dismiss the possibility that failure is due to their own abilities, which increases their political ambition. Conversely, framing underrepresentation around supply factors lowers ambition for white and Asian women, possibly because of stereotype threat. Black women respond in the opposite way, showing decreased ambition in demand scenarios, while Latinas are unaffected by these narratives. Overall, the authors’ findings show how framing intersects with racial and ethnic identity to shape political ambition.

    Learn more about this article here:

    Holman, M. R., & Schneider, M. C. (2018). Gender, race, and political ambition: How intersectionality and frames influence interest in political office. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 6(2), 264–280. https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2016.1208105

  • A multilevel approach to modeling health inequalities at the intersection of multiple social identities

    A multilevel approach to modeling health inequalities at the intersection of multiple social identities

    How can we better measure how intersecting identities shape health disparities? Evans et al. (2018) show that multilevel models offer an effective, practical way to study health inequalities across multiple overlapping social identities.

    Looking at how overlapping identities interact with systems of oppression and privilege is a central focus of health inequality research. Evans et al. present multilevel models as a new alternative for studying these intersections. By splitting the total variation across two distinct levels, this method draws attention to the differences that exist both between separate groups and within the same groups.

    To test their approach, the authors used a familiar example from social epidemiology: body mass index (BMI) measurements from 32,788 U.S. adults. Researchers often need to explore many combinations of identities and social dynamics. Here, Evans et al. compared multilevel models to the standard fixed-effects approach across five dimensions of social identity and standing—gender, race or ethnicity, income, education, and age—which combined into a total of 384 unique intersectional groups.

    The authors found that the multilevel approach offers several advantages over conventional models, including the ability to handle higher dimensions, adjust for different group sample sizes, keep models simple, and make findings easier to interpret. Furthermore, they discovered that a large portion of the overall variation occurred within the specific groups themselves. This showed that these intersectional categories had low accuracy for sorting individual risk on their own, leaving high differences in risk unexplained within each group. In conclusion, Evans et al. show that multilevel modeling is an innovative and valuable tool for analyzing intersectionality in health inequalities.

    Learn more about this article here:

    Evans, C. R., Williams, D. R., Onnela, J.-P., & Subramanian, S. V. (2018). A multilevel approach to modeling health inequalities at the intersection of multiple social identities. Social Science & Medicine, 203, 64–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.11.011

  • Intersectionality in Quantitative Psychological Research: I. Theoretical and Epistemological Issues

    Intersectionality in Quantitative Psychological Research: I. Theoretical and Epistemological Issues

    Can quantitative methods work with an intersectional framework? Else-Quest and Hyde (2016) show how combining quantitative research with intersectionality can expand research tools and deepen our understanding of psychology.

    While intersectionality has become a familiar buzzword in psychology and is widely known in feminist scholarship across the social sciences, its definitions often vary. Across these different definitions, Else-Quest and Hyde highlight three shared assumptions: first, all people belong to multiple social categories at the same time that are interconnected; second, each category carries an element of inequality or power; and third, these categories belong both to the individual and to the social context they live in, meaning categories and their meaning can shift and change.

    Treating intersectionality as an overall approach and a critical theory rather than a falsifiable theory, the authors evaluate its potential within quantitative research. To explore how well an intersectional approach fits with different research models, they discuss positivism, social constructionism, and standpoint epistemology, looking at what each means for research methods. Aiming to expand intersectional approaches within the psychology of women, Else-Quest and Hyde address both the challenges and the promises of bringing these perspectives together. Ultimately, the authors argue that researchers can successfully use quantitative methods within an intersectional approach, which will grow the field by giving intersectionality researchers more tools. At the same time, they urge quantitative researchers to adopt an intersectional approach, which will enrich and deepen how we understand psychological concepts and processes.

    Learn more about this article here:

    Else-Quest, N. M., & Hyde, J. S. (2016). Intersectionality in Quantitative Psychological Research: I. Theoretical and Epistemological Issues. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 40(2), 155–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684316629797