Exercise 3 solution

All sums checked in Python.

(a) Checked on race alone, the firm hires Black workers (the men on the factory floor), so it cannot be said to exclude people because they are Black. Checked on gender alone, the firm hires women (the white women in the office), so it cannot be said to exclude women. Each test passes, yet the Black woman is turned down for both jobs. The harm sits where the two categories meet, and a one-category-at-a-time test does not see it.

(b) The DeGraffenreid v. General Motors case (1976), as the Intersectionality page describes it: five Black women alleged compound discrimination in layoffs. The court considered race and gender separately, declined to consider compound discrimination, and dismissed the case. That was 1989 - 1976 = 13 years before Crenshaw's 1989 essay named the idea. The page's account is short, so I would not claim to know the full facts of the case.

(c) One acceptable limit: only 100,000 of 278,591 characters of the Intersectionality page were read, 35.9 percent, so about 64.1 percent (178,591 characters) was not seen, and later sections may qualify the account. Another acceptable limit is the page's own February 2025 notice that it focuses primarily on the United States, so cases and laws such as this one may not describe other countries.

A strong answer uses the two-category test in (a), names the case in (b), and gives a limit with a figure in (c).