What Is Workplace Discrimination — and How Do You Prove It?

Workplace discrimination is adverse treatment — in hiring, pay, promotion, discipline, or termination — because of a protected characteristic: race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity under current federal law), national origin, age 40+, disability, and genetic information, with many states adding more. [LEGAL REVIEW: current scope.] The legal core is causation: not whether something unfair happened, but whether the protected characteristic was a reason. Harassment is the same law's other face — unwelcome conduct based on a protected trait, actionable when severe or pervasive enough to create a hostile environment or when tied to job consequences.

How discrimination is actually proven. Direct evidence ("we need someone younger") is rare; cases are built on circumstantial patterns: comparators (someone outside your protected class did the same thing and was treated better), timing (strong reviews until the pregnancy announcement, the accommodation request, the complaint — then sudden "performance issues"), pretext (the employer's stated reason shifts, or doesn't survive contact with the documents), and statistical or pattern evidence in larger cases. This is why the practical advice is documentary: keep your reviews, offer letters, and relevant communications in your personal records (lawfully — your own employment documents, not confidential company data), and write down incidents with dates and witnesses while memory is fresh.

The internal-complaint step. Reporting through HR or the employer's policy does two things: it triggers the employer's legal duty to investigate and act, and — critically for harassment claims — it defeats the employer's defense that it never had a chance to fix the problem. It also converts you into a protected-activity participant: retaliation for a good-faith complaint is independently illegal, and retaliation claims now succeed more often than the underlying discrimination claims, largely because the timing evidence is so stark.

The deadlines that kill claims. Federal discrimination claims generally require an administrative charge with the EEOC within 180 or 300 days of the adverse act (depending on state-agency overlap) — far shorter than most people assume — followed by a right-to-sue process; state agencies run parallel tracks with their own clocks. [LEGAL REVIEW.] The consultation should happen in weeks, not "once I've moved on."