As critical quantitative methods have rapidly proliferated over the past decade [1], researchers have increasingly taken up QuantCrit, which integrates Critical Race Theory (CRT) into quantitative methodologies 2, 3, 4, 5. While scholars have used quantitative approaches to study racism in society for some time 6, 7, 8, 9, the emergence of QuantCrit is relatively recent. As QuantCrit has quickly taken off in the scholarly literature, scholars have coalesced around a set of core tenets: 1) The centrality of racism; 2) Numbers are not neutral; 3) Categories are neither natural nor given; 4) The importance of voice and insight; and 5) The necessity of an equity orientation 2, 3, 4, 5. QuantCrit is considered a specific critical quantitative approach, and not all critical quantitative approaches use QuantCrit; in other words, the terms are not synonymous.

However, a core commitment of CRT has long been attention to intersectionality. Intersectionality was coined initially by Crenshaw [10] to describe the unique social position of Black women, who experience the intersection of racism and sexism, leading to distinctive forms of discrimination and marginalization. An essential feature of intersectionality is the ways that it reorients analysis away from the specific identity categories or combinations of those categories and towards the systems that privilege, benefit, harm, or discriminate against particular social locations. For example, as in Crenshaw’s original argument, an employer might discriminate against Black women in promotions even if it was not discriminating against White women or Black men. The intersecting systems of gendered racism caused effects for Black women that were not experienced by others along a single-identity axis of similarity.

Intersectionality has received some attention in QuantCrit work as well. Such work has typically focused on identity category interaction effects 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. While researchers have acknowledged the limitations of that approach [16], which fails to adequately capture the intersectionality of systems and ideologies 17, 18, they have argued that the interaction effects might help elucidate intersectionality when adequately interpreted. However, we wondered what identities QuantCrit scholars have taken up. The works of Crenshaw [19], Collins [20], and others (e.g. [21]) have long pointed to the importance of gender in racist systems and dynamics. More recently, multiple scholars have called for increased attention to the interaction of race, gender, and sexuality [22] in what some have referred to as the intersectional system of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy 23, 24, 25, 26.

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate whether, to what extent, and how researchers have incorporated considerations of gender and sexuality in work that takes up a QuantCrit methodology or other critical quantitative approaches that center race and racism. We conducted a systematic literature review to determine what proportion of published QuantCrit pieces took up gender and/or sexuality, how authors defined gender and/or sexuality when they included them, how authors analyzed or considered gender and/or sexuality, and what substantive patterns they found about the interactions of race, gender, and sexuality variables and constructs.