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Equal Opportunities Preventing discrimination improves your chances of recruiting the best person for the job and getting the best performance from all those who work for you. However, unlawful discrimination discredits you as a business and can be very costly. It is unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of: sex, including pregnancy and maternity marital status, including civil partnership status gender reassignment a person's disability race age sexual orientation religion/belief trade union membership or non-membership status as a fixed-term or part-time worker Discrimination in day-to-day working practices   Direct discrimination is generally easily recognisable, e.g. where someone is denied employment because of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc.   Indirect discrimination, however, can be harder to detect and may often be unintentional. If a person feels they are discriminated against unlawfully, they may take a case to an employment tribunal. This could lead to heavy penalties for the employer and, in the absence of an appropriate explanation, employment tribunals are required to infer that discrimination has occurred. It is also important to bear in mind that it is unlawful to discriminate against part-time and fixed-term workers. For example, it would be unlawful to: refuse part-time workers the benefits offered to full-time only offer permanent employees training Most employers produce policies that set out the rules and procedures their staff need to know. A policy statement may help employees to understand what the employer expects of them, and their legal rights and obligations.