Inequality is never just one thing

Why an intersectional lens changes how universities see — and address — exclusion.

When a university asks whether it treats people fairly, it usually reaches for a single number: how many women graduate, how many are in leadership, how many complaints were filed. Useful — but partial.

The term intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, names something most of us already sense: discrimination rarely arrives one label at a time. A first-generation migrant student who is also a woman does not experience “gender” and “origin” in separate boxes. They overlap, and sometimes they multiply.

That is why Labs 4 Change does not look for one cause and one fix. We look at how spaces, language, materials, roles and protocols add up — and for whom they add up differently. A poster, a syllabus, a bathroom sign, who speaks in class: each is small, and together they tell a person whether they belong.

The shift is not to do more measuring. It is to measure with the people closest to the experience, and to treat equality as something built into everyday practice — not a report filed once a year.