ESL Questions Discrimination
Discrimination
From casual prejudice to structural inequality, these 75 questions about discrimination help students find their voice on a topic that matters. Works best for B1 and above, but the beginner set keeps it accessible and personal.
Beginner
Have you ever felt different from other people?
Do all people in your country look the same?
Is it wrong to treat people badly because of their age?
Have you ever seen someone treated unfairly?
Do men and women earn the same money in your country?
Can women work any job in your country?
Have you ever felt left out?
Is it important to treat everyone equally?
Do older people get good jobs in your country?
Have you ever heard a rude comment about someone's body?
Do children sometimes treat each other unfairly?
Is it wrong to judge someone by their clothes?
Have you ever been to a school with students from many countries?
Is it easy to make friends with people who are different from you?
Can short people face problems at work?
Do famous people sometimes say unfair things about groups of people?
Have you ever seen someone helped more than others for no clear reason?
Is racism a big problem in your country?
Do you think people judge others by how they look?
Have you ever helped someone who was treated unfairly?
Do people in your country treat foreigners well?
Is it wrong to judge people by their religion?
Have you ever changed schools or jobs because you felt unwelcome?
Do older and younger workers get the same respect at your workplace?
Is it important to speak up when you see unfair treatment?
Intermediate
Have you ever experienced or witnessed discrimination? What happened?
Do you think discrimination is always intentional, or can it be accidental?
What is the difference between a stereotype and a prejudice?
How do you think growing up in a diverse environment affects a person's attitudes?
Have you ever caught yourself making an assumption about someone based on their appearance?
Do you think discrimination in the workplace is taken seriously enough in your country?
What would you do if a friend made a discriminatory joke?
Is positive discrimination, like hiring quotas for minority groups, a fair solution?
How has social media changed the way people experience or report discrimination?
Do you think people are more or less prejudiced than they were twenty years ago?
Have you ever felt discriminated against for speaking a foreign language?
What's the hardest type of discrimination to prove, and why?
Do you think appearance-based discrimination, like lookism, is taken seriously enough?
How does discrimination affect mental health?
Would you report discrimination if you saw it at work? What would stop you?
Do you think children learn prejudice mostly from their parents or from their peers?
How should companies handle a manager who discriminates but also delivers great results?
Do you think discrimination laws in your country are strong enough?
Have you ever avoided a place or situation because you felt unwelcome there?
What's the difference between being insensitive and being discriminatory?
Do you think there's such a thing as discrimination against the majority?
How do you think immigrants experience discrimination differently depending on where they're from?
Should companies be required to have anti-discrimination training? Does training actually work?
Do you think online anonymity makes people more discriminatory?
What's one form of discrimination you think your society doesn't talk about enough?
Advanced
Is it possible to be both a good person and hold unconscious biases? What does that tell us about moral responsibility?
Structural discrimination can exist even when no individual intends to discriminate. How do you fix a problem with no clear villain?
At what point does protecting one group's rights begin to infringe on another's? Give an example and defend your view.
Is cancel culture an effective response to public discrimination or just a form of mob justice with a progressive veneer?
Should employers be able to consider race, gender, or background as a factor when two candidates are equally qualified?
How do you distinguish between cultural preservation and cultural discrimination?
Hate speech laws are meant to protect people, but who decides what counts as hate? What could go wrong?
Does framing everything as a systemic issue reduce individual accountability, or does it just acknowledge reality more honestly?
Is colorblindness, the idea of 'not seeing race,' a form of progress or a way of ignoring discrimination?
What happens when two marginalized groups have competing interests? Who mediates, and on what basis?
Why does discrimination based on class attract so much less political attention than discrimination based on identity?
Can national pride exist without some degree of in-group preference that edges into discrimination?
Is it possible to hold a sincere religious belief that conflicts with anti-discrimination law? How should courts handle that?
How does the language we use, words like 'minority,' 'underprivileged,' or 'diverse,' shape how we think about discrimination?
Is meritocracy a useful goal or a myth that justifies existing inequalities?
When does raising awareness about discrimination become counterproductive, deepening divisions rather than bridging them?
Should historical discrimination, like colonialism or slavery, factor into current policy decisions? For how long?
Do you think discrimination will ever be fully eliminated, or is in-group favoritism hardwired into human nature?
How does economic inequality interact with discrimination in ways that make both harder to solve separately?
Is it more damaging to be openly discriminated against, or to face subtle, deniable bias every day?
When companies issue diversity statements after a public controversy, what are they actually communicating?
Does the focus on visible diversity metrics, gender, race, sexuality, distract from less visible forms of discrimination?
Should children be explicitly taught about discrimination from an early age, or does that risk imprinting the very categories we're trying to erase?
How do you evaluate whether an anti-discrimination policy has actually worked?
What would a genuinely non-discriminatory society look like, and is it achievable without some loss of individual freedom?