Saturday, December 3, 2016
Dr. Jawad Syed, Dean of Suleman Dawood School of Business (SDSB) at LUMS was recently interviewed by the Financial Times, UK about his thoughts on the emerging concept of “intersectionality.”
Intersectionality is a relatively new concept, describing how oppressive institutions such as racism, sexism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, classism, etc. are interconnected and how this overlapping or intersecting of social identities causes related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination.
Dr. Syed, also a professor of organisational behaviour at SDSB, in the interview, shared findings of his recently conducted study on the experience of Pakistani women in British workplaces and spoke about the issue of multiple discriminations in the workplace.
Sharing his findings, he said that in many countries, anti-discrimination laws look at gender, race and ethnicity separately and when women of various races experience intersectional discrimination, there are no laws in their jurisdictions to protect them. He also discusses that in addition to the numerous legal hurdles, many cases of discrimination, individual or collective, are hard to prove. Dr. Syed also identifies why intersectionality is a comparatively unexplored concept because there is ‘little individual case law to show how it operates.’
The complete Financial Times article can accessed here.
