Intersectionality and MAIHDA conference
Friday, 10th July 2026, Lecture Theatre 3, The Wave, The University of Sheffield
With a pre-conference course on MAIHDA – Thursday 9th July 2026
This conference will focus on the use of MAIHDA – Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy – as a method for uncovering and understanding intersectional inequalities . MAIHDA has become widely used, both in social epidemiology where it was first proposed, and in other disciplines across the social sciences, and has been described as a gold-standard approach for quantitative evaluation of inequalities. The approach has been extended to consider causal effects, longitudinal data, spatial data, and more. There have also been a number of critiques of the method, considering both its statistical properties and its relationship with intersectional theory.
This conference will explore those issues, showcasing methodological advances and extensions of MAIHDA, advanced applications, and consideration and critique of MAIHDA and its goals. The conference will bring together academics from a range of substantive disciplines to think more deeply about the method and what it does and does not achieve. It will be of interest to researchers interested in quantitative approaches to intersectionality and multiplicative social inequalities. There will be poster presentations for those who wish to present their own MAIHDA (or MAIHDA-related) work.
The keynote speaker for the conference will be Dr Clare Evans at the University of Oregon, who first conceived of MAIHDA in her 2015 doctoral dissertation, and has been central to its development and application since then.
To book this free conference please follow this link
Intersectionality and MAIHDA Training Course
9th July, The Wave, The University of Sheffield
Multilevel models allow researchers to use data that has a clustered structure – such as pupils nested within schools, or individuals within neighbourhoods. Recently, a version of multilevel models has been developed for the study of intersectional inequalities in individual outcomes. With the Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy (MAIHDA), individuals are nested within their intersectional strata – that is their combination of various sociodemographic identity categories –for instance gender, age, ethnicity and social class.
This method has great potential for uncovering and understanding intersectional inequalities, where a combination of social identities combine in complex ways to produce societal (dis)advantage.
This training course will provide a short introduction to the intersectional MAIHDA approach. We will briefly cover multilevel models more generally, before focusing on MAIHDA. We will then consider extensions of MAIHDA, for instance when considering varying slopes, or when using longitudinal data. Throughout, we will show how to use the MAIHDA approach, some key statistics that can be produced from that approach, give advice on how to visualize the results that are produced, and how to interpret the results robustly.
The course will include interactive lecture sessions, and computer practical exercises that can be undertaken in either Stata or R.
Prerequisites: we will assume that attendees have a good understanding of regression models and multilevel models, including random intercept and random slopes models. For those who would like a refresher in this, we recommend completing module 5 of the Centre for Multilevel Modelling LEMMA online course (this is free, but you have to register), or attending the CMM “Introduction to Multilevel Modelling” course (booking available here) that is running a few weeks prior. Attendees should also be familiar with fitting statistical models in either R or Stata.
To book this training course please follow the link
Intersectional Health 