Is More Always Merrier? Intersectionality as an Antecedent of Job Insecurity

Abstract

As modern workplace environments are becoming increasingly diverse, the experiences of disenfranchised employees have become a topic of great interest to scholars and business professionals alike. While the experiences of individuals with singular stigmatized identities have been well-established, a dearth of research has assessed how intersectionality, i.e., holding multiple stigmatized identities, combine and intertwine to shape workplace experiences. We contribute to a growing literature on intersectionality by assessing the extent to which employees identifying with multiple stigmatized identities may constitute a risk factor for the experience of job insecurity, a prevalent and potent economic stressor. Additionally, we propose that job insecurity will partially mediate the relationship between intersectionality and a variety of adverse workplace outcomes associated with increased job insecurity perceptions. In order to test these hypotheses, we collected survey data from 449 employed individuals within the United States over two timepoints. Results of the tests of our direct and indirect hypotheses revealed that individuals with more stigmatized identities reported greater perceptions of job insecurity, and intersectionality indirectly affected workplace outcomes via this heightened job insecurity. Our results highlight a new antecedent of job insecurity for consideration and is meant to motivate others to approach diversity-related research questions with multiple identities in mind, in an effort to encapsulate the full spectrum of one’s experience based on their identity makeup.

An investigation of quantitative methods for assessing intersectionality in health research: A systematic review

“… There is a potential for systematic bias in sample recruitment and selection These methods do not provide a clear reference group or appropriate comparison group. Sum of marginalized identities ( Lavaysse et al, 2018 ; Remedios & Snyder, 2018 ) This approach collapses multiple social positions into a continuous variable by adding the number of marginalized identities an individual has (larger numbers imply a greater number of marginalized identities). 497–602 4–6 Yes, when combined with other analytic approaches (e.g., regression analysis) that allow for the control of confounders When added to a regression model, the interpretation of this term in a regression model could be a test for whether adding more marginalized identities (i.e., having 5 versus 4 marginalized identities) increases the risk of an outcome.…”

“…Of note, this model is equivalent to the more conventional intersectional model including indicators for race, gender, and their interaction – and can easily be used to estimate the same three parameters; this holds more generally for analyses considering two or more intersectional positions, provided all higher order interactions are included in the model. Another approach used the number of social positions defined to be stigmatized based on context, including race, marital status, gender, sexual minority status, military status, age, religion, and nationality ( Lavaysse et al, 2018 ). Notably, this approach assumes that the effects of all social positions are similar.…”

Career Barriers of Chinese Self-Expatriate Women: Neither Double Jeopardy nor Ethnic Prominence

“…Buchanan and Fitzgerald (2008) found a disproportional disadvantage for being both African American and female in documented cases of workplace harassment in the United States (US), which is in line with double jeopardy, and Syed and Pio (2010) found some evidence of double jeopardy in a study with career opportunities of first-generation Asian Muslim women in Australia. Two recent studies also provided some evidence for double jeopardy: Woodhams et al (2015) in a study within a single firm in the UK found that pay decreased sharply along with increases in the number of minority groups employees belonged to, and Lavaysse et al (2018) with a sample from the US workforce found a positive association between number of presumably disadvantaged groups the individual belonged to and perceived job insecurity. On the other hand, Levin et al (2002) supplied some support for ethnic prominence by finding that women with African or Latin American origins in the US did not expect more gender discrimination than their male counterparts, but they expected to be discriminated against because of their ethnicity.…”

Editorial: The Intersections of Economic Insecurity, Non-Standard Employment and Gender in Southern Europe

“…Relatedly, we know little about what happens when gender interacts with other socially constructed statuses and how those interactions shape different experiences of disadvantage, employment experiences and paths to non-standard, precarious work and economic insecurity ( Lavaysse et al, 2018 ). Socially constructed statuses interact and their intersectionality creates mechanisms of accumulated disadvantage and inequality, making some individuals and groups more vulnerable to economic insecurity compared to others ( Maroto et al, 2019 ; Misra, 2021 ).…”