Prejudices are attitudes towards people or groups of people that are associated with negative evaluations; certain characteristics (real or alleged) are singled out and considered typical for this group of people. Prejudices are thus based on generalisations and are at the same time pejorative.
Examples of prejudice can be:
- "Migrants are uneducated".
- "Women are not good bosses."
- "Fathers can't take care of children as well as mothers."
Mostly they refer to the following characteristics of a person:
- Gender
- Age
- Religion
- Political opinion
- Appearance
- Level of education
- A person’s origin
Prejudices can also influence how one behaves towards others. They can form the mental basis for discriminatory behaviour (cf. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (The Federal Agency for Civic Education), 2012).
Discrimination is the disadvantaging of a group of people on the basis of certain characteristics such as origin, language, appearance, gender, skin colour, religion, culture or level of education (cf. Faktensammlung Diskriminierung der Bertelsmann Stiftung 2018 [Collection of Facts on Discrimination by the Bertelsmann Foundation, 2018]).
Discrimination can occur in different ways:
- Discrimination can occur openly and thus be noticed by those involved, e.g. when valuable skills are explicitly denied to certain employees in internal agreements and discussions ("He can't do that because he is a migrant").
- However, discrimination can also be take place covertly, e.g. when colleagues are shunned because they have a different origin or religion.
- Discrimination can also be structural in nature, e.g. when applicants with German-sounding names are regularly preferred over applicants with "foreign" sounding names even though they have the same qualifications.
(Source: Faktensammlung Diskriminierung der Bertelsmann Stiftung 2018)
Those affected unquestionably suffer from discrimination. They cannot show their abilities and do not feel valued. A lack of recognition can often lead to low self-esteem among those affected.