What Causes Discrimination in the Workplace?
Have you been witnessing unlawful discrimination in the workplace, or have you personally experienced it? Discrimination can take many different forms like age discrimination, gender discrimination, religious discrimination, race discrimination, color discrimination, or sex discrimination.
Whatever form of workplace discrimination comes your way, you should know that anti-discrimination laws prohibit discrimination in the workplace.
Both the human rights and the civil rights act protect employees from workplace discrimination, and any such case should be immediately reported.
What Do We Mean By Workplace Discrimination?
Discrimination in the workplace essentially means possessing discrimination-based behavior towards any particular race, color, religion, sex, or disability discrimination. Such an attitude can result in biased or favored/unfavored behavior towards a particular race, color, religion, sex, or age group. Statistics suggest that different races are treated differently or treated unfairly in the United States. It can result in unequal employment opportunities for different classes. Whereas the federal employment act guides companies to ensure equal employment opportunity for every citizen and get rid of any existing discriminatory practices.7 Most Common Reasons/Types of Employment Discrimination
As explained earlier, discrimination-based behavior in the workplace can be due to multiple reasons. Let’s dig deep into some of the most common ones:
1. Racial Discrimination
Racial discrimination (also known as race discrimination) is discrimination based on an individual’s race or color. If a person is treated unfavorably based on the race they belong to, they are a victim of racial discrimination or race discrimination.
Color discrimination is also a different type of race discrimination that occurs when someone is treated unfairly based on their skin color.
2. Gender Identity Discrimination
Everyone possesses their gender identity, and if someone is being treated unfairly for their gender identity, they face gender discrimination in the workplace. Many companies have a history of paying less to female gender identity, making them undergo gender discrimination.
The problem of gender discrimination has reduced over time, but still, there are millions of cases of female gender identity being treated differently.
Gender discrimination is now not only limited to female gender identity, but transgender gender identity is also struggling to overcome gender discrimination against them.
3. Disability Discrimination
Disability discrimination means to have discrimination-based behavior toward the disabled workers. Disability discrimination has been on the rise for a few years now.
According to EEOC, one-third of discrimination claims made in 2019 were based on disability discrimination filed by disabled workers.
However, the disabilities act protects disabled workers from being treated differently, and they can seek protection under the disabilities act if such an incident occurs.
4. Pregnancy Discrimination
You must have heard of pregnancy discrimination before. Pregnancy discrimination is discriminating against pregnant women or new mothers.
If an employer refuses to hire a pregnant woman or one planning to be pregnant, it’s a form of pregnancy discrimination. Terminating an employee after she has gotten pregnant is also pregnancy discrimination.
5. Religious Discrimination
Everybody has the right to possess their religious beliefs and also to practice their religious beliefs freely. So, if someone is treated unfairly due to their religious beliefs, they have the legal right to complain against such discrimination in the workplace.
6. Age Discrimination
Age discrimination is one of the fastest-growing discrimination types. Age discrimination particularly refers to unfavorable treatment of employees aged more than 40. Age discrimination is truly a result of the company’s age preference.
Age preference can result in old age individuals not getting hired. Age discrimination can make organizations set an upper age limit for job applicants.
Also, even if 40+ guys get hired, they are constantly worried about being fired due to age discrimination. Age discrimination is rising quickly and is becoming a more critical form of employment discrimination.
7. Sexual Orientation Discriminatory Practices
With social media causing more awareness, sexual orientation-based discriminatory practices have been highlighted. For decades, people with unorthodox sexual orientations have been targeted by discriminatory practices.
Sexual orientation-based discriminatory practices include not hiring an individual with a particular sexual orientation, and hiring practices have been like that. Hiring practices at many places discourage hiring a person with a certain sexual orientation. Such discrimination is also known as LGBTQ Discrimination.
Also, if an individual’s sexual orientation differs from the orthodox sexual orientation, they may get terminated just because of a particular sexual orientation. However, people of any kind of sexual orientation are protected by the law and can’t be fired for having a specific sexual orientation.
People with any sort of sexual orientation have been granted equal employment opportunities by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
This law protects employees from any sort of workplace discrimination. According to Title VII of the civil rights act, it is illegal to discriminate against someone based on their race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
