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The year 2025 will mark 50 years since the prohibition of gender discrimination in employment in Europe. Feminist narratives of this time have often been ones of progress, despite Black feminist critique of how such legislation effaced racially minoritised women's experiences. Why was gender equality legislation designed to mainly benefit white privileged women? What discourses were involved? Meanwhile, while the term 'white feminism' has recently been popularised, there has been relatively little investigation of what it comprises in politics in Europe. Drawing on cross-disciplinary empirical research on UK gender equality legislation involving analysis of parliamentary debate, archival research and oral history, this article contributes to theorisation of the tenets of white feminism, namely, as a political ideology wherein gender is constructed as the most important marker of social inequality and, specifically, as being more important than racial inequality. Ultimately, such specification aims to make white feminism in politics impossible to render neutral.

The recent intensification of both intersecting inequalities and demands for change calls for an intersectional approach which can account for the complexity of factors and processes structuring social relations, risk and outcomes. Yet intersectionality is thought to be a challenging theory to apply, and represents a puzzle to policymakers and practitioners navigating policy area and equality strand silos. Based on the first empirical study internationally to explore how both practitioners and policymakers themselves understand how to operationalise 'intersectionality', this article establishes different ways in which the theory of intersectionality is applied in practice. 'Intersectionality' is understood and used in five contradicting ways in UK equality organising and policy, an integral insight because some of these advance intersectional justice while others serve to further entrench inequalities. This typology is proposed as a heuristic to analyse the ways in which intersectionality may be institutionalised in other countries and sectors, and their outcomes, discursive and material.

Abstract
This article explores the barriers that UK equality third sector organizations practising community development face when seeking to operationalize intersectionality. It is based on research with three networks of equality organizations (racial justice, feminist, disability rights, LGBTI rights, refugee organizations, etc.) in cities in England and Scotland employing mixed qualitative methods. Barriers to operationalizing intersectionality including power relationships with the state, challenges relating to neoliberal austerity, and competing discourses of identity-based 'equalities' and socioeconomic 'inequality' were identified. The article argues that equality third sector organizations are significantly hampered in their attempts to operationalize intersectionality by the low status they occupy vis-à-vis the state and by neoliberal austerity contexts.

This article synthesises the findings from two studies on the operationalisation of intersectionality in Scotland: one in equality policy and NGOs, and the other in domestic abuse policy-making. Drawing upon Ashlee Christoffersen's framework of applied concepts of intersectionality, this article analyses the competing and contradictory ways that intersectionality is institutionalised in Scottish policy and practice. It highlights the contestations and debates that arise when actors with varying understandings, agendas, and levels of political will attempt to apply intersectionality. We argue that dominant approaches to applying intersectionality in Scottish equality and domestic abuse policymaking are additive and superficial, a consequence of power inequalities shaping who has access to policymaking processes and institutions. Beyond the Scottish case, the article highlights key lessons concerning how to operationalise intersectionality in policy and practice in ways that are truer to its original conceptualisation in Black feminism.

Celis and Childs have called for a 'second generation' of feminist scholarship on representation that foregrounds intersectional heterogeneity and emphasises responsiveness to representatives beyond parliaments. We build on these important contributions, arguing that second-generation feminist scholarship and democratic design can make the greatest gains by operationalising intersectionality in close alignment with its origins in Black feminism and critical race theory. First, to foreground intersectional heterogeneity, we posit that feminist scholarship on representation must shift away from the overarching category 'women', exemplified in the popular operationalisation of intersectionality as 'diversity among women'. We instead propose a margins-to-centre approach that centres the intersections of race, gender and other power structures. Second, we exemplify what this shift looks like in practice. We show how centring racially minoritised women and the intersecting structures that position them within political institutions transforms strategies to improve responsiveness to this intersectionally marginalised group.