Intersectionality and Family Policy Research: Four Approaches
This paper contributes to ongoing debates about the need to incorporate intersectionality in research on family and care policies. For a long time, scholars have lamented the middle-class and white-bias implicit of notions such as work-life balance and dual earner-dual carer models. While an increasing number of studies have worked to include a wider set of inequalities beyond gender, progress towards the incorporation of intersectionality in family policy research has remained scattered and piecemeal.
This paper argues that the complexity and polysemy of intersectionality align with multiple analytical approaches. Because intersectionality possesses multiple meanings, a wide range of existing research adopting widely different concepts of intersectionality, and designs to investigate relationships between inequalities is compatible with an intersectional approach to the analysis of family policies. Further research that does not claim to be explicitly intersectional is also informed by varied assumptions about the way specific policies address the inequalities experienced by different social groups. Therefore, there is a wealth of research that is relevant to advancing an intersectional understanding of family policies.
This paper aims to advance the consolidation of knowledge about different ways to do intersectionality in family and care policy research. Building on the work of Ange Marie Hancock, Leslie McCall and Olena Hankivsky, and secondary analysis of published research, this article delineates four distinct approaches that can be used to advance the application of intersectionality in policy analysis. The four approaches illuminate aspects of intersectionality which span across the outcomes, policy design, the policy process and the development and politics of family and care policies.