Understand
The idea of intersectionality has become a frequent topic of discussion both in academic sociology, as well as among popular movements for social justice such as Black Lives Matter, intersectional feminism, and LGBT rights.
- Intersectionality proposes that an individual's experience of society has aspects that are irreducible to the sum of one's various identities considered individually, but are "greater than the sum of their parts." In this work, we show that the effects of intersectional identities can be statistically observed in empirical data using information theory.
- We show that, when considering the predictive relationship between various identities categories such as race, sex, and income (as a proxy for class) on outcomes such as health and wellness, robust statistical synergies appear.
- These synergies show that there are joint-effects of identities on outcomes that are irreducible to any identity considered individually and only appear when specific categories are considered together (for example, there is a large, synergistic effect of race and sex considered jointly on income irreducible to either race or sex).