Discriminatory Practices

Discriminatory practices are the actions, routines, and behaviors through which individuals and organizations treat people unequally because of their group membership, whether in hiring, promotion, lending, policing, schooling, housing, or everyday interaction. They may be deliberate and overt, or subtle, habitual, and unrecognized by those who carry them out. Gordon Allport described a scale of prejudice from antilocution to avoidance, discrimination, physical attack, and extermination, while Robert Merton showed that discrimination can occur without prejudiced attitudes. Devah Pager and Hana Shepherd reviewed evidence of discrimination in employment, housing, and credit, and Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan’s resume experiment revealed callback gaps by name. Philomena Essed coined the concept of everyday racism to describe routine, cumulative experiences, and Derald Wing Sue’s work on microaggressions examined subtle insults. Rosabeth Moss Kanter analyzed how tokenism disadvantages women in organizations, and Joan Acker argued that organizations are gendered. Lauren Rivera showed how elite employers favor candidates resembling themselves. Erving Goffman’s analysis of stigma explains how discredited attributes shape interaction. Measures to counter practices include audits, monitoring, and training. Discriminatory practices remain central to research on inequality, organizations, labor markets, race, gender, and social justice.