SEWSA 2016 Intersectionality in the New Millennium: An Assessment of Culture, Power, and Society

Defining Class in Intersectional Research

Room 222, DiGiorgio Campus Center (DiGs)

Following passage of Title VII of the US Civil Rights Act of 1964, US antidiscrimination policy uses a mono-categorical approach that separates race and gender into separate axes of oppression. This approach fails to take into account the fact that workers are intersectionally located in the social structure by their race, gender, and class. Antidiscrimination policy has in turn shaped the diversity practices of work organizations, which also reflect this mono-categorical approach separated by race and gender. Antidiscrimination efforts in organizations have been largely ineffectual due to this separation. Further compounding the problems of persistent race and gender discrimination at work is a failure by organizations and policy makers to recognize that class also differentially positions individuals in the social structure and, in turn, the workplace. Intersectional scholarship, however, is deficient in studies that include specific measures of class. To truly understand how class informs intersectional outcomes, a structural and visible definition of class that follows the same logic of race and gender is needed. Using a neo-Marxist framework of class informed by class location, I posit that workers in executive, administrative, managerial, and professional occupations act as a proxy of the capitalist class, as their decision-making authority and knowledge skills distinguish them from the working class. Using this categorization as a quantitative means to create a discrete class variable, the hypothesized three-way interaction of race, gender, and class becomes statistically testable. This model serves as a first step in explicitly including a measure of class in intersectional scholarship.