About IAW

Intersectionality Awareness Week exists because identity is never just one thing.

About

What is Intersectionality Awareness Week?

Intersectionality Awareness Week is a global awareness campaign dedicated to spotlighting the lives, experiences, and challenges of people who exist at the crossroads of multiple marginalised identities.

This year (2026), Intersectionality Awareness Week will take place between 11th – 17th May.

Every year, this week brings together individuals, organisations, and communities to move beyond single-issue conversations about equality and start talking about the full, complex picture of who people are. Because identity is never just one thing. Race, disability, gender, sexuality, class, and more do not exist in isolation. They overlap, interact, and shape lived experiences in ways that mainstream diversity and inclusion frameworks too often miss.

Intersectionality Awareness Week creates dedicated space to change that. Through events, conversations, campaigns, and advocacy, the week amplifies the voices of intersectional communities and challenges the systems and structures that marginalise them.

ParaPride

Pride in Everybody

Intersectionality Awareness Week was founded by ParaPride, an intersectional charity that supports, advocates for, and builds awareness of the disabled LGBTQ+ community. Alongside a growing coalition of intersectional partners and charities, ParaPride launched the annual campaign to raise the profile of intersectional communities: their challenges, their stories, and their unique and valuable diversity.

ParaPride’s work sits at the heart of what Intersectionality Awareness Week stands for. As an organisation that exists specifically to serve people who are both disabled and LGBTQ+, they understand first-hand what it means to fall between the gaps of single-issue advocacy and why intersectional awareness matters.

donotdelete-mobile

Pride in Everybody

Intersectionality Awareness Week was founded by ParaPride, an intersectional charity that supports, advocates for, and builds awareness of the disabled LGBTQ+ community. Alongside a growing coalition of intersectional partners and charities, ParaPride launched the annual campaign to raise the profile of intersectional communities: their challenges, their stories, and their unique and valuable diversity.

ParaPride’s work sits at the heart of what Intersectionality Awareness Week stands for. As an organisation that exists specifically to serve people who are both disabled and LGBTQ+, they understand first-hand what it means to fall between the gaps of single-issue advocacy and why intersectional awareness matters.

Crenshaw

What is intersectionality?

To understand Intersectionality Awareness Week, it helps to understand where the concept comes from.

Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989. She used it to describe how social categories such as race, gender, and class intersect to create overlapping experiences of discrimination. Furthermore, she highlighted how these forms of discrimination compound, and how the legal system often fails to recognise their combined impact.

Crenshaw grew up in Ohio during the civil rights and second-wave feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s. Consequently, her upbringing shaped her thinking in profound ways:

“My mom was a little bit more radical and confrontational and my father was a little bit more Martin Luther King and ‘find common ground’. Which is probably why there are strains of both of those in my work.”

Her framework has transformed how we understand discrimination and it remains as urgent today as ever.

The need

Why do we need Intersectionality Awareness Week?

The world often reduces identity to single labels. However, people’s lives are far more complex than that. Intersectionality Awareness Week exists to spotlight the overlapping experiences of those living at the crossroads of multiple marginalised identities.

Intersectionality Awareness Week has three core goals:

Too many people carry identities that mainstream spaces were never designed to hold. Intersectionality Awareness Week creates a platform for those voices. We centre the stories of disabled LGBTQIA+ people, Black and POC communities, refugees, and others. Furthermore, we do this not in spite of their complexity, but because of it. As a result, experiences that systems too often flatten or ignore entirely finally get the space they deserve.

Representation alone is not enough. Intersectionality Awareness Week actively calls on governments, employers, educators, and institutions to act. Specifically, we push for frameworks that reflect the full reality of people’s lives. A one-size-fits-all approach to inclusion leaves the most marginalised people furthest behind. Therefore, equitable policy must recognise and respond to the compounding barriers that intersectional communities face every day.

For too long, equality movements have operated in silos. Race here, disability there, gender somewhere else. Intersectionality Awareness Week challenges that fragmentation directly. We bring intersectional communities and their allies together. Consequently, we move the conversation towards collective action. Moreover, we push back against a system that asks people to choose which part of themselves to advocate for.

Get involved

Intersectionality Awareness Week is, we hope, the beginning of a global cultural shift away from diversity and inclusion frameworks that focus on single aspects of identity, and towards a more holistic, compassionate, and open understanding of the people around us.

Get Involved Donate