Applying Intersectionality in Organizations: Inequality Markers, Cultural Scripts and Advancement Practices in a Professional Service Firm

This paper presents an intersectional analysis of career advancement practices in professional service firms. It reveals how gender, class, racio‐ethnicity and culture intersect at the individual, organizational and societal levels to create and reinforce advantages and disadvantages across complex dimensions of difference. Based on a qualitative analysis of data collected in a Big Four firm in Mexico, this article advances the empirical study of intersectionality in organizations by applying the construct of ‘cultural scripts’ and proposing the use of ‘markers of inequality’ to illuminate the simultaneous construction of differences of gender, class and racio‐ethnicity in a specific socio‐cultural context. Our findings show that career trajectories and advancement in this firm are contradictory processes, over‐determined by individual employees' lived identities, work interactions shaped by those identities, as well as formal and informal organizational practices embedded in an already raced, classed and gendered societal context and culture.