Well, nowadays discrimination comes in many different forms. It’s a little bit different than before where you could tell you’re being discriminated against because it was just blatantly obvious, where people would make racist or ethnic slurs or they would comment on people’s age or disability and sort of outwardly make fun of them.
It’s become a lot more insidious in terms of it being under the surface. And so it’s rare that people will say things that are blatantly discriminatory. Now what typically happens is people will use kind of coded words. So for example, for people who are older, they might say, “Well, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” or they might make similar comments about a person’s race or ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation, all the things that are protected from discrimination. And so we look for the things that people say and they don’t clearly show their mind. You know, you can still tell with a smart discriminator. The things that they say might give them away.
For the most part, we look at the actions. People will say all the right things for the most part, but then their actions will sort of contradict everything that they’ve said. Discrimination is really about differential treatment. And the other thing is, you know, when you look at performance reviews, when you look at promotions, when you look at job opportunities, discrimination happens when one group gets them and another one doesn’t or doesn’t get them to the same extent.
What is not permitted is when that denial of an opportunity or a job benefit happens because someone is of a certain race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, they have a disability, or if they reported unlawful activity if they’re a whistleblower.
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