The Concept

This chapter examines how intersectional discrimination has been understood in discrimination law. The analysis reveals that courts across jurisdictions have understood this category of discrimination not only as a matter of intersectionality, but also in various other ways, such as single-axis discrimination, multiple discrimination, additive discrimination, embedded discrimination, and compound discrimination. The chapter considers the relative position of these categories along a continuum and maps the qualitative differences between them as against the category of intersectional discrimination. It argues that the differences matter diagnostically in that only the category of intersectional discrimination properly so called, explains the causality in intersectional discrimination based on multiple grounds.