Discrimination (disambiguation)

Look up discrimination in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Discrimination refers to the act of perceiving differences in characteristics between elements of one or more groups. It often refers to various types of negative or positive prejudices toward a group of people.

Prejudice

Discrimination is an act of prejudice in which members of one group are treated differently from those in another group.

• Ageism, based on age
• Classism, or class discrimination, based on social class
• Discrimination based on skin color, or colorism, in which human beings are treated differently based on the social meanings attached to skin color
• Economic discrimination, based on economic factors
• Genetic discrimination, when people are treated differently because they have or are perceived to have a gene mutation that causes or increases the risk of an inherited disorder
• Height discrimination or heightism, based on height
• Homophobia, a range of negative attitudes and feelings toward homosexuality or people who are identified or perceived as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT)
• Linguistic discrimination, the unfair treatment of an individual based solely on that individual's use of language
• Lookism, the positive stereotypes and preferential treatment given to physically attractive people, or more generally to people whose appearance matches cultural preferences
• Racism, based on social perceptions of biological differences between people
• Religious discrimination, valuing or treating a person or group differently because of that person's or group's beliefs
  • Discrimination against atheists, the persecution of those labeled or identifying themselves as atheist
• Sectarian discrimination, bigotry, discrimination or hatred arising from attaching importance to perceived differences between subdivisions within a group
• Sexism, or gender discrimination, based on a person's sex or gender
• Transphobia, a range of negative attitudes against transsexuality and transsexual or transgender people
• Untouchability, the practice of ostracizing a group by segregating its members from the mainstream by social custom or legal mandate

Business

Discrimination associated specifically with business-related practices.

• Data discrimination, the selective filtering of information
• Employment discrimination, a business practice in which employers hire or terminate employees based on factors unrelated to performance or skill
  • Labour discrimination, the differentiation of workers based on factors that do not have a role in determining productivity
  • Pregnancy discrimination, a type of employment discrimination that occurs for expectant parents
• Housing discrimination, real estate and housing rental, sales, lending, or mortgage discrimination
• Institutionalized discrimination, the unjust treatment of an individual or group of individuals by organizations and other societal entities
  • Mortgage discrimination, the practice of banks, governments or other lending institutions denying loans to one or more groups of people
• Nepotism, favoritism granted to relatives in politics or business
• Price discrimination, or price differentiation, a pricing strategy where identical or similar goods or services are transacted at different prices by the same provider in different markets or territories

Law

• Anti-discrimination law, a law on the right of people to be treated equally
• Equality before the law, the principle under which all people are subject to the same laws of justice
• Labour law, mediating the relationship between employees, employers, trade unions and the government

Science and research

• Discrimination learning, a classic topic in the psychology of learning from the 1920s to the 1970s studying the process by which animals or people learn to make different responses to different stimuli
• Discrimination testing, a technique employed in sensory analysis to determine whether there is a detectable difference among two or more products
• Markovian discrimination, a method used in spam filters to model the statistical behaviors of spam and nonspam
• Statistical discrimination (economics), an economic theory of racial or gender inequality based on stereotypes
• Tactile discrimination, the ability to differentiate information received through the sense of touch
• Two-point discrimination, the ability to discern that two nearby objects touching the skin are distinct