Covert discrimination is often hard to spot because it happens as personal microdiscrimination against one person or few people only without them belonging to a common minority group. As such, the people discriminated against are not protected by any minority group anti-discrimination measures, and are often abused without the abuse being detectable by outsiders because the abusing discriminators treat outsiders without discrimination, so they become none the wiser about the microdiscrimination happening against the one individual or few that are discriminated against.
That is why I wrote a guide on how to spot covert discrimination in the Ruby Community and beyond. It will be a live document that is always updated whenever new forms of covert discrimination are discovered. It is written from my experience working at both Canadian and US Software Development companies.
Forms of Covert Discrimination:
1. Treating The Majority Well: in order for covert discrimination to remain covert, it has to seem like the discriminators are very good well adjusted people who treat "everyone" with love and non-discrimination. So sometimes, discriminators will treat everyone very well except one or a few individuals in their team, company, or community, which are subtly treated in a very unloving, mean, and non-equality-conscious way. How easy is it to spot discrimination when 99%+ of people are not discriminated against? Not easy at all. In fact, this is a scheme that some discriminators at unethical companies use to basically milk one person out like the Golden Goose for the benefit of everyone else without returning the favor back to them, and every time that person is replaced, a new person plays the role of the "Golden Goose".
2. Culture Fit: some companies do not see all people as equal human beings that could only be distinguished based on their merit (i.e. work performance and ethics). So, if they hire someone that they later find out they do not like by their non-equality-minded discriminatory biased inner standards, they chalk it up to a "bad culture fit" and fire that person, citing "culture fit" being the issue despite the fired person being very friendly, pleasant, and team-oriented while performing impeccably. Do not fall for this trap of covert discrimination. Companies have no right discriminating against anyone, and they could only fire someone if they did not perform well at their job or interacted in a bad way with others. If they fire someone for "culture fit" reasons despite the fired person not having done anything wrong, that is 100% covert discrimination masked as "culture fit". The only culture fit that matters is if the hired person has the right qualifications for the job or not, including how ethical and team oriented they are. Anything is else, like "not liking someone" for non-professional reasons despite them not having done anything wrong, is a lazy lame excuse to justify discrimination. Such companies sometimes practice this sort of discrimination because they were offering preferential treatment to employees that were not as qualified as the person who recently joined the company, and that person unintentionally made them look bad just by performing very well, so instead of requiring humility from the other employees in order for them to stop being envious and learn from the new hire, they end up punishing the new hire unfairly to go back into masking their preferential treatment for the older unqualified employees that the company discriminators grew to "like" for unprofessional reasons.
3. Hidden Prejudice: some discriminators will discriminate against someone because they have hidden prejudices against them that they sometimes are unaware of. They see someone, and based on their look, that someone does not look like "an important person" to them. Even after they get to know that person and their job qualifications and past accomplishments, they still do not change their mind about seeing that person as "unimportant". That is because they do not treat everyone as equal and some people are just "unimportant" no matter what, due to internalized discrimination against their type of person. To them, it does not matter if that person has very good university degrees, has 10+ years of experience, has presented at important software conferences, has created and maintained very sophisticated open-source projects, etc... That person will forever be "unimportant" to the discriminators who have hidden prejudices against certain people just based on their looks or other petty reasons. This is a very bad form of covert discrimination because it is so covert sometimes even the discriminators are unaware of it.
4. Emotional Dishonesty: some discriminators like to keep a "positive" facade at all times because they think it sells better to their clients instead of sharing the actual truth, so they train everyone at their company to be emotionally dishonest. To them, the impression of "positivity" that you put on your face is more important than how good your work is truthfully. The problem at such environments is when anything negative happens, it becomes a big elephant in the room that nobody could talk about, and remains there for months or years without ever getting handled. So, when a new hire joins such a company and discovers an extreme waste in productivity caused by one or several of those "big elephants" for so many years that everyone got used to them, as soon as they mention the negative truth, they are seen as "the enemy" and fired. Again, that is a form of covert discrimination because those new hires did not do anything wrong. They only pointed out what is wrong. They just pointed out the truth. And, yet they got punished for it. Another form of emotional dishonesty is combined with hidden prejudice. For example, a new hire joins a company because they met the company job qualifications, but afterwards, discriminators at the company realize they hate that person, and yet they "smile" every time they see them and they act as if "they're doing great". If that person does a bad job by mistake (everyone makes mistakes), the discriminators continue "smiling" and pretending "everything is fine", which puts the new hires at ease for artificial reasons instead of actually receiving normal work feedback that helps them improve their work performance. One day, the discriminators use that lack of improvement in new hires as justification to fire them, but only because they hated them since day one and were not willing to offer them the same feedback they offered other hires that they "liked" for emotional bias reasons unrelated to work. Again, that is a form of covert discrimination.
5. Double Standards: having double standards is common in non-covert forms of discrimination too, but it is a lot more subtle in covert discrimination. It can also be a form of indirect discrimination via preferential treatment for some people over others. For example, some employees are allowed to be loud and inappropriate at meetings and be late at delivering their work even though it is a general standard that all employees must be respectful at meetings and must deliver their work on time. For example, a company would allow someone to be mean to and unsupportive of their colleagues, but if any of the colleagues tried to defend themselves against that mean behavior, they are labelled as "the enemy of teamwork" while all the wrongdoings of the initial perpetrators who started the real wrongdoing against their teammates are ignored. Another example of this is a company that claims to have policies against discrimination, but they practice Ageism openly in their hiring practices without ever treating it as a form of discrimination. In fact, many companies (but not all) that claim to be "against discrimination" often do so with double-standards that mask covert discrimination. After all, if a company advertises itself as "against discrimination" that would make everyone believe at face value that there is no discrimination going on there when in fact there might be some very bad forms of covert discrimination going on at such companies (though not all of them).
6. Fake Love: in order to keep a facade of love for everyone, including people that are discriminated against, discriminators would provide the people discriminated against with a false exaggerated form of "love" that belittles them with baby-talk as if they are helpless little children that could not succeed with anything on their own. I am not talking about offering sincere help to someone who asked for it. I am talking about forcing "help" just to make someone look bad no matter how many times that person proved themselves with past good performance and how many times they tried to say they 'don't need any help' because they did not truly need it. And, that is while discriminators treating everyone else normally as mature empowered adults who do not need their help unless it is asked for. This is another form of covert discrimination.
7. Unavailability & Lack of Interaction: some discriminators will make themselves available to most everyone except one person or a few people in their team, company, or community, with which they will feign lack of availability or will be extra lazy towards respectfully providing them with availability, often as a result of personal prejudices and biases against the people discriminated against. If the problem is brought up to the discriminators, they will avoid discussing the problem and pretend "everything is fine" and they are just "busy as usual". Again, that is a form of covert discrimination as those discriminators do not treat everyone that way.
8. Lack of Sympathy: some discriminators will treat some people as if they do not have human feelings like all other human beings. They will be very cold and distant towards them while putting on a pleasant face to everyone else. The people discriminated against never did anything wrong, so this is a form of covert discrimination against them.
9. Not Owning Up To Error: discriminators will often continue their discrimination even after it is pointed out to them because they do not like owning up to their error like mature adults, yet instead, they like to offer lame excuses like children. Obviously, no good work ever got done with lame excuses, but still they insist on offering lame excuses instead of addressing covert discrimination.
Now, let us wrap up by providing a legend of terms used in this article.
- Covert Discrimination: discrimination that is done covertly to escape detection
- Microdiscrimination: discrimination that is done to one person or a few people only, often not sharing any commonality in a minority group that could offer them protection
- Personal Discrimination: discrimination that is done to one person only. This is often the most difficult kind of discrimination to detect because there are no other people that could report the same experience as the one person being treated with discrimination.
As mentioned before, this is a live document, so it will be updated whenever new information about the topic is uncovered.
Expect covert discrimination numbers 7, 8, and 9 to be practiced by discriminators who read this article.
Please share this document with everyone to spread awareness of the problem of covert discrimination, especially if you have experienced any form of covert discrimination yourself.
