Identity-Based Labels: Are They Helpful or Harmful?

Much of our work here at GET Cities relies heavily upon the use of identity-based labels. In fact, those labels are stated clearly in our mission statement — we aim to accelerate the representation and leadership of women, trans, and non-binary humans in the technology sector. The use of these identity-based labels is undeniably important due to the measurable absence of women, trans, and non-binary, and people (particularly those who are also people of color) in the tech industry; and understanding how a particular group of people identifies helps us more directly address the barriers they face. However, we know that categorizing people based on labels has just as much potential to harm as it does to help.

We also know that identities are complex. They are multifaceted and can change, intersect, and evolve over time; there’s no one label that can appropriately capture someone or their lived experience. And at times, the ways in which communities have historically been labeled or defined doesn’t necessarily match up with the ways in which they define themselves. From my career in communities that hold a lens to social justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging, many marginalized groups do not think of themselves as directly related to these terms.

In diversity, equity, and inclusion work, categories that identify people by race, gender, ability, and socioeconomic class can be both helpful and harmful. This is why, as the GET Cities team engages in our work, there is an ever present question:

How can we make use of labels in social justice work without succumbing to stereotypes and doing further harm?

How can labels help us?

Labels can be useful because they can unify and give language to help us easily understand, identify, and address the needs of large (and small) groups of people. An example of this can be understood with use of the term “marginalized communities”: a group of people who have been excluded from mainstream social, economic, educational, and/or cultural life. The last two years have illuminated some of the meaning, impact, and experience that this label represents through the rise of COVID-19. Data shows there are distinct groups of people negatively impacted by rates of mortality, domestic violence, access to technology for educational advancement, and many other ways that people did not fare well in a global health crisis. Many interventions were created to help lessen exposure of illness for children and families via mask mandates, philanthropy and governments moving to action to support those who need it most. And when the first vaccines were introduced, the elderly and the immunocompromised were prioritized as the first recipients. These efforts wouldn’t have been possible or effective without using certain identity-based labels to categorize people as “high-risk”.

Hosting an identity-based initiative is helpful in our work because we are able to ground our interventions with an understanding of shared barriers that women, trans and non-binary people, particularly those who are also people of color, face in the technology sector. Through using evidence-based research, we can identify the inequities that people of certain races, genders, sexualities, ability level, and socioeconomic status face, and the ways in which these inequities may overlap or differ from each other. Gender bias overlaps and manifests differently than racial bias, and both overlap with socioeconomic status, for instance.

This thought-process is how we’ve designed many of our interventions. GET Chicago Venture Fellows, for example, is an intervention that emerged out of the collaborative Tech Equity Working Group (TEWG) and is now hosted by one of our partners and TEWG members Chicago:Blend. The program is for underrepresented, aspiring venture capitalists to gain the knowledge, networks and investment experience needed to break into the venture industry. Another example is GET Champions, which seeks to increase the hiring of diverse talent, create and maintain a psychological safety in the work environment, and close the pay gap with regard to gender, race, and other protected characteristics. These two programs wouldn’t be possible without us directly naming those we are aiming to serve with these simple labels.

Another way labels are useful is they give people a sense of pride, community, and belonging, especially for humans who have been historically marginalized. #BlackGirlMagic, LGBTQ Pride celebrations, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and HERstory come to mind. Systemic oppression is an ever-present, dispiriting battle; these moments and movements of time are critical for groups who share certain labels and identities to come together and uplift each. In my experience of coalition building in social and professional settings, affinity groups are essential to grounding in the present, building trust, and finding ways to advance goals, reduce disparities, and promote equity. The adage of there being “power in numbers” embodies the foundation of how to change conditions so that there is “just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential.”

How can labels perpetuate harm?

As stated earlier, identities are impossibly complex and cannot be reduced to a single label. And when we attempt to do so, despite some of the benefits, this can also lead to confirmation bias and create conditions for people to make unfair and inaccurate assumptions about others, based solely on that particular label. In a widely circulated article from the late 90s, White Supremacy Culture, Tema Okun lists fourteen characteristics that can be damaging in the ways they default to whiteness. One tenant of white dominant culture is the either/or and the binary. It shows up as positioning options or issues as either/or — good/bad, right/wrong, with us/against us. This tenant is used to pit oppressions against each other instead of acknowledging how racism, sexism, and classism intersect.

We’ve seen evidence of this in the STEM industry. Back in 2005, former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers made negative headlines when he suggested that the underrepresentation of women in math and science fields was due to “intrinsic gender differences” between women and men rather than outright discrimination. The assumption that women are less adept in certain fields simply because they are women is not a new belief; but it does represent a vast oversimplification and misunderstanding of how a patriarchal society works to oppress all those who are not cisgender men. More recently, we’ve also seen how the use of labels can negatively impact GET Cities work through the passage of the “Stop Woke Act” and the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, both of which polarize and “other” groups of people based on gender, race, or sexual identity. Legislation such as this hinders progress made for women, people of color, and the LGBTQIA+ community in the state of Florida in recent years.

Where do we go from here?

Regardless of the drawbacks, labels are still essential in DEI work, and it is clear that they are not going away any time soon. As such, it’s up to those of us in the social justice space to be intentional and thoughtful about the ways in which we use labels to lessen harm and to benefit marginalized groups. When our team centers intersectionality and the fact that no person is one label, we take the following sensibilities into consideration:

1. Take notice when you or others use ‘either/or’ language and make time to propose more than two alternatives. Consider a ‘both/and’ approach.
2. Avoid simplifying complex issues, especially when important decisions are made.
3. Refrain from assigning a single cause to a problem or challenge; acknowledge which oppressions intersect and reinforce each other along with how they operate at the interpersonal, institutional, and cultural levels.
4. Don’t make assumptions about what people need; ask them upfront.
5. Design interventions based on the lived experience of those most central to the issue.
6. Lead with research — with both the quantitative that helps us understand where big problems sit, and the qualitative that helps us understand the nuance of these problems.
7. Continue to learn internally with workshops that center multiple identities of women, trans, and nonbinary humans.

Labels are essential because acknowledging who is specifically impacted is a first step toward solving challenging issues of our time. In order to increase the representation and leadership of women, trans, and nonbinary people in the technology sector, we must center these identities to build our sensitivity to the needs of marginalized communities without polarizing them.