The GAP Team's Commitment to Intersectionality

The GAP team is committed to strengthening our focus on intersectional research to center the needs and experiences of marginalized people and communities in closing gender gaps. The impact of gender policy interventions on women and people with other marginalized gender identities can often be obscured by research on gender that centers wealthy, White, and cisgender women.

As GAP retains its gender policy focus, we aim to provide practitioners with actionable research that identifies how gender intersects with other identities, especially marginalized identities, to create unique experiences for the people and communities impacted by policy interventions. Further, intersectionality, which is rooted in Black feminist thought, requires us to think not just about the varied experiences of people with different intersecting identities but to also engage deeply with the systems of power and oppression which characterize these experiences. 

As a first step, we conducted an audit of GAP’s content as of March 2021, examining intersections of gender with race, class, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion and cultural identities. This audit is a tool for us to understand thematic areas and identity groups that are most in need of additional focus on our site. However, the audit results are a starting point and by no means represent an exhaustive list of the work to be done; the GAP team is committed to overall significantly increasing the share of intersectional content.

The audit results highlight both identity groups and topic areas (based on the twenty topics GAP uses to categorize research) for which very little or no intersectional research is currently available on GAP. From this, we have identified disability, LGBTQ identities, and age, as well as the GAP topic areas Negotiation, Compensation, Competition, Political Participation, and Poverty Alleviation as initial focus areas for sourcing new content. 

We will also focus on the intersections of gender and race in sourcing new content. While our audit showed gender and race as the identity intersection that was most represented in GAP’s current content, racial diversity within GAP’s content is limited and the vast majority of content does not meaningfully engage with identity outside of gender. Fully understanding the impact of racism on gender policy interventions is essential to dismantling systemic inequality and will be a key priority for GAP as we build a more intersectional database of research.

In addition, the audit’s qualitative component highlighted thematic gaps that should be focus areas for new content. Some of these qualitative focus areas are: increasing the content on racial disparities in the Maternal Health and Compensation topic areas; literature in the Poverty Alleviation topic area that focuses on poverty in high-income countries; ensuring that literature on poverty in low-income countries directly engages with colonial legacies; and expanding research on workplace discrimination for underrepresented groups within the Talent Management topic.

A key constraint in developing an intersectional focus for GAP is the limited availability of truly intersectional policy research, which not only disaggregates results based on intersecting identities but also engages with the implications of disparities between groups. This is especially relevant for GAP, which focuses on experimental approaches, since intersectional methods and research have gained a more significant foothold in qualitative fields. 

However, we want to provide policy makers with the tools to implement interventions that center the needs of marginalized communities even when research that uses an intersectional methodology is not yet available. When this is the case, we will aim to source studies that provide insight into a policy intervention’s effects on under-studied groups. For example, in absence of intersectional studies addressing maternal mortality in the US that break results down by race and class, we would aim to source studies that center women who experience worse maternal health outcomes, including Black, Indigenous, and poor women. Through this approach, we hope to help practitioners develop policies that adequately address the needs of marginalized communities even as intersectional research lags behind.

• Meaningfully expand the share of GAP’s content that takes an intersectional approach to gender policy and closing gender gaps. The GAP team has conducted a literature review guided by the findings of our intersectionality audit, and have achieved our goal of adding 15 intersectional research summaries to GAP by the end of 2021.
  • To find the summaries organized by content type, read our compiled intersectional research summaries.
  • GAP has also added six new summaries on intersectionality during the calendar year 2022, bringing the total intersectional summaries 61, 21% of all research included on GAP.
  • Some of our newest intersectional content was featured in a fall 2021 seminar series focused on intersectional gender equity hosted by the HKS Women and Public Policy Program. Majority of these seminars were recorded and can be found on WAPPP's Youtube.
  • We also welcome submissions of articles that would further GAP’s intersectional lens, with the caveat that GAP focuses on experimental approaches. If you have an article you would like to see included on GAP, please let us know.
• Do our part to encourage broader use of intersectional research methods in gender policy research. The GAP team continues to collate resources for gender equity researchers who may be interested in approaching their experimental research studies from a more intersectional lens, including reports on intersectional research frameworks, data equity, and community-centered research practices.

• Actively incorporate intersectionality into our work as a team and into our approach to advancing gender equity more broadly
  • We will continue to educate ourselves as a team on intersectional feminism, especially in the context of gender policy and research translation, by sharing and discussing resources, training new writers and editors on intersectional frameworks, and hiring and supporting a diverse team to shape GAP.
• The GAP team will continue to engage and collaborate with other research translation tools which have similar and aligned focuses, including other Harvard Kennedy School projects such as the Race, Research and Policy Portal of the IARA Project.