Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, height, physical appearance, age, and weight.

Patricia Hill Collins writes: "Du Bois saw race, class, and nation not primarily as personal identity categories but as social hierarchies that shaped African-American access to status, poverty, and power.

[27] Similarly, in her 1892 essay "The Colored Woman's Office," Anna Julia Cooper identified Black women as crucial agents of social change, emphasizing their unique understanding of multiple forms of oppression.

By the 1980s, as second-wave feminism began to recede, scholars of color including Audre Lorde, Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Angela Davis brought their lived experiences into academic discussion, shaping what would become known as "intersectionality" within race, class, and gender studies in U.S. academia.

While feminists during this time achieved success in the United States through the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title IX, and Roe v. Wade, they largely alienated black women from platforms in the mainstream movement.

[35] However, third-wave feminism—which emerged shortly after the term intersectionality was coined in the late 1980s—noted the lack of attention to race, class, sexual orientation, and gender identity in early feminist movements, and tried to provide a channel to address political and social disparities.

[36] An example of this idea was championed by Iris Marion Young, arguing that differences must be acknowledged in order to find unifying social justice issues that create coalitions that aid in changing society for the better.

[40] Thus, the women of the Combahee River Collective advanced an understanding of African-American experiences that challenged analyses emerging from black and male-centered social movements, as well as those from mainstream cisgender, white, middle-class, heterosexual feminists.

[59] According to black feminists such as Kimberle Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins, experiences of class, gender, and sexuality cannot be adequately understood unless the influence of racialization is carefully considered.

This focus on racialization was highlighted many times by scholar and feminist bell hooks, specifically in her 1981 book Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism.

[19] Black feminists argue that an understanding of intersectionality is a vital element of gaining political and social equity and improving the societal structures that oppress individuals.

Those who experience privilege within the social hierarchy in terms of race, gender, and socio-economic status are less likely to receive lower wages, to be subjected to stereotypes and discriminated against, or to be hired for exploitative domestic positions.

According to Crenshaw, a political failure of the antiracist and feminist discourses was the exclusion of the intersection of race and gender that places priority on the interest of "people of color" and "women", thus disregarding one while highlighting the other.

Gloria Anzaldúa, scholar of Chicana cultural theory, theorized that the sociological term for this is "othering", i.e. specifically attempting to establish a person as unacceptable based on a certain, unachieved criterion.

Stephanie A. Shields in her article on intersectionality and gender[71] explains how each part of someones identity "serve as organizing features of social relations, mutually constitute, reinforce, and naturalize one another.

For example, the work of Loretta Ross and the SisterSong Collective[78] has emphasized how policies disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, and Latina women, highlighting the importance of applying an intersectional lens in policy-making.

[11] For example, within the institution of education, Sandra Jones' research on working-class women in academia takes into consideration meritocracy within all social strata, but argues that it is complicated by race and the external forces that oppress.

In Analyzing Gender, Intersectionality, and Multiple Inequalities: Global, Transnational and Local Contexts, the authors argue: "The impact of patriarchy and traditional assumptions about gender and families are evident in the lives of Chinese migrant workers (Chow, Tong), sex workers and their clients in South Korea (Shin), and Indian widows (Chauhan), but also Ukrainian migrants (Amelina) and Australian men of the new global middle class (Connell)."

Under the Equality Act 2010, the things that are listed as 'protected characteristics' are "age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation".

About the effect of the state on identity formation, Patil says: "If we continue to neglect cross-border dynamics and fail to problematize the nation and its emergence via transnational processes, our analyses will remain tethered to the spatialities and temporalities of colonial modernity.

[100] Reilly, Bjørnholt and Tastsoglou note that "Yuval-Davis shares Fineman's critical stance vis-à-vis the fragmentising and essentialising tendencies of identity politics, but without resorting to a universalism that eschews difference.

[103] To provide sufficient preventive, redressive and deterrent remedies, judges in courts and others working in conflict resolution mechanisms take into account intersectional dimensions.

[9] Critics include Marxist historians and sociologists, some of whom claim that the contemporary applications of intersectional theory fail to adequately address economic class and wealth inequality.

Curry specifically points out how Crenshaw's intersectional model depends on second-wave feminist ideas imported from subculture of violence theorists who argue for a view of Black masculinity that is compensatory and sexually predatory.

In Mary Hawkesworth and Lisa Disch's The Oxford Handbook of feminist theory, Cooper points to Kimberlé Crenshaw's argument that the "failure to begin with an intersectional frame would always result in insufficient attention to black women's experiences of subordination."

Different, more inclusive styles of teaching have gained traction as teachers continue to work towards accessibility for a wider range of students, specifically those affected by disability.

[115] As Laura Gonzales and Janine Butler explain in their article, when common language is unable to be reached, students may need to use other methods of communication such as gestures, visuals, or even technology.

What is found, is that every human mind has its own biases in judgment and decision-making that tend to preserve the status quo by avoiding change and attention to ideas that exist outside one's personal realm of perception.

[121] This intersectional perspective,[clarification needed] highlighting similarities between the different forms of oppression and their interlinked nature, is advocated for in critical animal studies and ecofeminist literature.

[126] Magical identity and practice, either legitimate or falsely alleged, intersect with gender and race, having historically impacted women, Jewish people, and enslaved Africans in unique ways.