Organizational Leaders and Intersectional Advocacy

Social and economic justice organizations (SEJOs) often provide the sole form of political representation for marginalized communities in the United States. Despite broad representational claims, however, they are less likely to advocate on behalf of intersectionally disadvantaged constituents. We argue that SEJOs pursue intersectional advocacy at higher rates under conditions of descriptive representation by their leaders. We test this claim using an original dataset of bureaucratic lobbying efforts by a set of such groups between 2004 and 2014. We find that organizations led by Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color (BIWOC) and white women promote intersectional advocacy at significantly higher rates than those led by men of any race or ethnicity, but that organizational mission, rather than leadership, predicts the influence of intersectional advocacy. We conclude that while descriptively representative leadership can rectify biases in advocacy agendas, structural conditions moderate intersectional policy influence.