Characteristics, Contributions, and Gaps of Social Work Literature on Gendered Racism

Background and Purpose: Since the 19th century, women of color activists and scholars have led efforts to address social injustices at the intersection of sexism and racism or gendered racism, as coined by sociologist Dr. Philomena Essed (1991). The harmful impacts of gendered racism on women of color have been well-documented by social science scholars, particularly in psychology (Brown et al., 2017; Lewis & Neville, 2015) and sociology (Laster Pirtle & Wright, 2021; Spates et al., 2020). Given the commitments of the social work profession to serving oppressed groups (NASW, 2021), social work is positioned to contribute important scholarship on gendered racism. As of yet, the extent and nature of social work literature on gendered racism remains unclear. Thus, we conducted a scoping review driven by two questions: (1) What are the characteristics of peer-reviewed social work literature on gendered racism? (2) What are the gaps in peer-reviewed social work literature on gendered racism?

Methods: This study was guided by Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) scoping review framework and followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews checklist (Tricco et al., 2018). We searched for peer-reviewed journal articles published between January 1, 1991, and March 1, 2023 in several social science databases. We searched from 1991 as it was the year “gendered racism” was coined (Essed, 1991). The inclusion criteria specified that articles: 1) were published in English in peer-reviewed journals, 2) used the term “gendered racism,” gendered racist,” or “gendered racial,” and 3) were social work-affiliated by author or journal.

Results: Of the total sample of 33 articles, the majority were published in 2021 and 2022 (57.8%, n = 19), featured quantitative research (51.5%, n = 17), and were published in psychology (39.4%, n = 13) or interdisciplinary social science journals (21.1%, n = 7). Several topics of gendered racism were represented, including gendered racial socialization, gendered racial stereotypes, gendered racial microaggressions, structural or context-specific gendered racism, and gendered racial stress. Most articles focused on Black women (70.8%, n = 17). While the majority of articles provided practice implications (62.5%; n = 15), few provided policy implications (29.2%; n = 7).

Conclusion/Implications: The finding that most of the articles were quantitative studies published in psychology or interdisciplinary social science journals reflects the profound contributions of Black feminist psychology and sociology scholars to intersectional scholarship (Collins, 1990; Lewis & Neville, 2015). As the reviewed articles largely concentrated on Black women, we call for greater attention to populations that are underrepresented in the literature, particularly Indigenous, Latine, transgender, and gender-expansive people. Our finding that the majority of articles provided practice but not policy implications points to the need for scholars to better promote the importance of structural interventions informed by analyses of gendered racism. Finally, we recommend social work journals provide special issues for scholars to dialogue about gendered racism as pertains to social work education, practice, and policy, including its relationship with, and distinction from, intersectionality theory.