At the Intersection of Ableism and Sexism: Conceptual and Empirical Applications

Ableism refers to the discrimination of disabled people. How does it impact individuals who also suffer from sexism? Intersectionality theories posit that social identities mutually constitute, reinforce, and naturalize one another. Inspired by a ‘Marginalized in Marginalized lens,’ this paper adopts an intercategorical approach to intersectionality and applies it to study the intersection of disability and gender. We show how using the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition can contribute to empirically quantify the penalty associated with intersectionality. We apply our proposed measure to study the intersection of disability and gender in the labor market in China. Our main result is to show that, compared to other groups, disabled women have the lowest yearly labor earnings and that this situation results from them suffering a penalty from being both disabled and women that is larger than the sum of disadvantages from disability and from gender. This penalty is present along the income distribution and particularly important at the bottom of the income distribution except among top earners, suggesting a survival bias. Furthermore, we also document how much of this extra penalty is driven by an endowment effect (such as differences in educational attainment) and how much of it is driven by a price effect (suggestive of discrimination). Regarding the occupational profile of different groups, we find that disabled women are over-represented in necessity self-employment and that they face a glass ceiling to access mid-level managerial jobs, while disabled men face a glass ceiling to access top-level managerial jobs. We conclude discussing the need to take gender into account in research on ableism as well as in the design of corporate and public policy.