Buzzword or Blueprint? How Does Lighthouse Global Bring Intersectionality into Practice?

In evaluation and research, we spend much of our time trying to understand how people experience programs, systems, and services. And if that work has taught us anything, it is this: no one experiences a program as “a woman” or “

an immigrant” or “a low-income resident” in isolation. A person could be all of these at once, and it is the combination of these characteristics, could shape whether a clinic feels welcoming, whether a survey question makes sense, or whether a service is truly within reach. Understanding those overlaps, and the different realities they create, often determines whether our findings describe a community as it is. 

As a Latin women-owned small business, we know from our own trajectories that the way the world receives us has never been explained by any single label. Being a woman shapes one set of experiences, being an immigrant another, being a Latina professional in the research field yet another, and the reality we actually live sits at the meeting point of all of them. Carrying that awareness into our work has taught us to approach every community we partner with from a place of cultural humility: assuming there is always more to learn and asking whether our methods make room for people’s full, layered selves. 

Today, we would like to delve into a framework that names this complexity: intersectionality. Our honest starting point is one of caution. The word has become so widespread that it risks becoming a buzzword, something organizations invoke to signal values rather than to change practice. We invite you to join us in exploring what the theory actually says, and how we try to move it from language into method. 

In the 1970s, a group of Black women sued General Motors for discrimination and lost. The court reasoned that the company could not be discriminating by race, because it hired Black men, and could not be discriminating by sex, because it hired white women. More than a decade later, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw returned to that ruling and analyzed what it had failed to see. These women were being excluded precisely as Black women, in a way that neither category alone could capture. It was in examining the results of this case, and others like it, that she coined the term “intersectionality” to name the blind spot her analysis had revealed. When discrimination is assessed one axis at a time, the people living at the crossroads disappear (Crenshaw, 1989). 

Since then, the idea has traveled from law into sociology, political science, public health, and everyday conversation, growing to include dimensions like disability, sexuality, language, and immigration status. Along the way, an important nuance is often lost. Intersectionality is not simply the observation that we all “have multiple identities.” It is a lens for seeing how systems of power overlap, how advantage and disadvantage compound differently depending on where a person stands (Carbado et al., 2013). Put simply, what each of us experiences at the individual level, in a clinic waiting room or a job interview, reflects larger social structures operating all at once (Bowleg, 2012). 

Popularity, however, comes at a price. As the term spread, its meaning thinned: a review of studies claiming to use an intersectional approach found that roughly one in four never defined the concept at all (Bauer et al., 2021). That gap between invoking the word and applying it is exactly what we want to avoid, because intersectionality is meant to be more than vocabulary; it is at once a way of studying the world, a way of analyzing data, and a call to act on what we find (Collins, 2015). 

So, is intersectionality a buzzword or a blueprint at Lighthouse Global? Our answer is: that depends on us, every day, in every project. In our research and evaluation practice, it means resisting the habit of treating demographic characteristics as separate boxes to check. When we listen to Latine families navigating asthma, for instance, we are not hearing from “immigrants” plus “parents” plus “Spanish speakers”; we are hearing from people who are all of these at once, like a mother whose experience of the healthcare system is shaped simultaneously by language, immigration status, gender, and income. Designing our questions, samples, and analyses around those intersections, rather than around single categories, changes what we can see.  

This lens also shapes our communications work, reminding us that no single story represents a community. It deepens our commitment to participant autonomy: whenever possible, we create space for people to define their own identities in their own terms. After all, the original lesson of intersectionality is about who gets erased when institutions impose their categories onto people’s lives. We will not always get it right, but the framework itself invites exactly that honesty, and we would rather keep learning out loud than get comfortable. 

References 

Bauer, G. R., Churchill, S. M., Mahendran, M., Walwyn, C., Lizotte, D., & Villa-Rueda, A. A. (2021). Intersectionality in quantitative research: A systematic review of its emergence and applications of theory and methods. SSM - Population Health, 14, 100798. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2021.100798 

Bowleg, L. (2012). The problem with the phrase women and minorities: Intersectionality—an important theoretical framework for public health. American Journal of Public Health, 102(7), 1267–1273. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2012.300750 

Carbado, D. W., Crenshaw, K. W., Mays, V. M., & Tomlinson, B. (2013). Intersectionality: Mapping the movements of a theory. Du Bois Review, 10(2), 303–312. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X13000349 

Collins, P. H. (2015). Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology, 41, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112142 

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), Article 8, 139–167.