Discrimination (information)

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

Discrimination may also refer to:

Prejudice

• 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 racial 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
  • Religious discrimination against Neopagans, the religious persecution of those labeled or identifying themselves as Neopagan, such as Wiccans for example
• 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
• Speciesism, based on the species the individual belongs to
• 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
• Discriminant, in algebra

Other

• Taste (sociology), specifically taste discrimination in distinguishing goods by their quality