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

[9][8] Its critics suggest that the concept is too broad or complex,[10] tends to reduce individuals to specific demographic factors,[10][11] is used as an ideological tool,[12][11] and is difficult to apply in research contexts.

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.

[6][31] In her 1892 essay "The Colored Woman's Office", Cooper identified Black women as crucial agents of social change, emphasizing their unique understanding of multiple forms of oppression.

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.

[38] 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.

[43]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.

[26] Crenshaw delves into several legal cases that exhibit the concept of political intersectionality and how anti-discrimination law has been historically limited, such as DeGraffenreid v Motors, Moore v Hughes Helicopter Inc., and Payne v Travenol.

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.

[55] Third-wave feminism—which emerged shortly after the term intersectionality was coined—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.

[56] From the 1980s, a number of non-Western feminists of color began to engage with the concept of intersectionality, such as Awa Thiam, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chela Sandoval, and others.

Lorde suggests that ignoring the multiple dimensions of identity perpetuates systems of oppression, and criticizes mainstream feminism for failing to address the specific experiences of marginalized women.

[60][61][62][a] According to black feminists such as Crenshaw, Lorde, Collins, and bell hooks, experiences of class, gender, and sexuality cannot be adequately understood unless the influence of racialization is carefully considered.

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.

Studies of the labor market and intersectionality provide a better understanding of economic inequalities and the implications of the multidimensional impact of race and gender on social status within society.

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.

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

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.

[95] 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.

[65]: 506–507  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).

Loretta Ross and the SisterSong Collective suggest that healthcare policies disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, and Latina women, highlighting the importance of applying an intersectional lens in policy-making.

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.

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

[112] Beverly Guy-Sheftall says, "black women experience a special kind of oppression and suffering in this country which is racist, sexist, and classist because of their dual race and gender identity and their limited access to economic resources".

[12] Downing says intersectionality, seen through the framework of Andrea Dworkin's class-based radical feminism, focuses too much on group identities and interests over individuality, leading to simplistic analysis and inaccurate assumptions about how a person's values and attitudes are determined.

[10] Iris Marion Young suggests that differences must be acknowledged in order to find unifying social justice issues that create coalitions that aid in changing society for the better.

[9][6][8] Sociologist Kathy Davis says intersectionality's broad applicability and consideration of multiple factors makes it a useful critical tool: "It encourages complexity, stimulates creativity, and avoids premature closure, tantalizing feminist scholars to raise new questions and explore uncharted territory.

[121][13] Liam Kofi Bright, Daniel Malinsky, and Morgan Thompson suggest a framework of graphical causal modeling to provide "empirically testable interpretations of intersectional theory" to address such concerns.

By depoliticizing intersectionality neoliberal market regimes empty radical struggle of structural critiques and translate them into palatable (unthreatening) narratives of social justice, multiculturalisms.

[122] Curry says Crenshaw's intersectional model depends on second-wave feminist ideas, imported from subculture of violence theorists who argue that Black masculinity is compensatory and sexually predatory.