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The Daily Insight

What is the disparate impact theory of discrimination?

Author

William Smith

Updated on April 02, 2026

Disparate impact refers to discrimination that is unintentional. The procedures are the same for everyone, but people in a protected class are negatively affected. For example, say that job applicants for a certain job are tested on their reaction times, and only people with a high score are hired.

What is the difference between disparate treatment discrimination and disparate impact discrimination?

Both disparate impact and disparate treatment refer to discriminatory practices. Disparate impact is often referred to as unintentional discrimination, whereas disparate treatment is intentional. Disparate treatment is intentional employment discrimination.

Is Gaslighting a fallacy?

This is called an ad hominem logical fallacy, and it’s so characteristic of abuse, it’s often just called ‘personal abuse. ‘ You could even say that gaslighting is simply a veiled ad hominem attack, and that resisting makes a manipulator show their true colors.

What is discriminatory effect?

”[a] practice has a discriminatory effect where it actually or predictably results in a disparate impact on a group of persons or creates, increases, reinforces, or perpetuates segregated housing patterns because of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.

What is intentional discrimination?

Generally, intentional discrimination occurs when the recipient acted, at least in part, because of the actual or perceived race, color, or national origin of the alleged victims of discriminatory treatment.

What is slothful induction fallacy?

Slothful induction, also called appeal to coincidence, is a fallacy in which an inductive argument is denied its proper conclusion, despite strong evidence for inference. Its logical form is: evidence suggests X results in Y, yet the person in question insists Y was caused by something else.

What is comparative evidence of disparate treatment?

Comparative evidence of disparate treatment occurs when a protected class applicant is treated less favorably than other applicants and is typically discovered through a comparative analysis during a fair lending examination. A comparative analysis is a method used by examiners to compare protected class applicants with control group applicants.

Does a policy predicated on bad statistics result in discrimination?

In other words, if this policy is predicated on bad statistics, it will result in de jure racial discrimination.

Is there evidence that racism is systemic?

An abundance of evidence has been presented to support the idea that racism is systemic or is proliferating in our society, but I am unable to draw that conclusion from the proof on offer. The evidence I have seen almost always suffers from at least one of three flaws.

Is racism or bias the predominant causal factor?

If racism or bias is claimed as the predominant causal factor, its effects must be isolated from those of other potential causal factors. (For more on differentiating causation from correlation, see this Steven Pinker lecture .)