A closer look at home, at work and everywhere in between

Intersectionality in business: Reflecting on last week’s episode with Dr. Mildred Boveda, Amber and Stephanie talk about how gender is just a small piece of a woman’s identity, and how understanding intersectionality can (and should) influence the approach brands take when considering their target market.

Looking beyond gender: The most commonly discussed traits for user personas are gender, age and race. But what about the other aspects of a woman’s identity? Culture, language, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, religion and life journey are all aspects of a woman’s identity that can shape her perspective. Amber and Stephanie discuss some of the more common aspects of a woman’s identity that may influence her perspective.

Supporting intersecting identities: How do you support the various identities within your market without leaving someone out or, even worse, alienating anyone? The two discuss how teams can identify and connect with multiple audiences.

Meet Dr. Mildred Boveda, designer of the intersectional competence measure.  Designer of the “Intersectional Competence Measure,” Dr. Mildred Boveda shares her experiences as an Afro-Latina wife and mother of two who navigated from poverty to Harvard. She designed the “intersectional competence measure, a tool used to connect teachers with a growing diverse student population.

Diversity and inclusion gaps. Feeling as though the standard diversity and inclusion conversations were missing an important component, Mildred wanted a more comprehensive approach to understanding how social categories intersect. She began studying intersectionality — the interconnected nature in which social categories such as race, class, and gender, overlap and then create interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.

From theory to practice, The Intersectional Competence Measure: To help create connections between teachers and students, Mildred created the intersectional competence measure tool. The tool has three steps:

• Recognition — acknowledging where people differ and how those differences impact their experiences/perspectives.
• Collaboration — identifying ways to fill the diversity gaps through collaboration (i.e., “Who can I work with to meet this person’s needs?”).
• Reflection — evaluating your own personal beliefs to see how they influence your views and perspectives.

Seeing people’s differences. As humans, we’ve been trained to group people together. We focus on gender, race, marital status, tax bracket, etc. and this need to categorize causes us to overlook what makes us special. Historically, black women have used their voice and experience to expose the gaps in understanding created by not acknowledging the many dimensions of people’s (particularly women’s) true identities.   Sojourner Truth brought this disparity to our attention in her famous “Ain’t I A Woman” speech. Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw identified the gap when she coined the term “intersectionality” over 20 years ago. Dr. Patricia Hill Collins reiterated the concept when she shared it during a lecture that Mildred attended. And now Mildred is helping teachers do more for their students by seeing their intersecting identities. Intersectionality is looking beyond gender to see women for who we really are: different.