Discuss. Equal opportunities legislation is in place to prevent employees and in some cases customers from being discriminated against because of their race, colour, nationality, ethnic origin, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, age or disability. According to the TUC, there are two forms of discrimination. Direct discrimination occurs when people are treated less favourably than others simply because of sex, colour, race, nationality or ethnic origin. An example would be a company refusing to employ a woman because she has children, but employing a man with children. Indirect discrimination is when a rule which is supposed to be applied equally, is in reality unfairly disadvantageous to one group of people. An example would be a company advertising a job saying that only people with English as their first language should apply. This indirectly discriminates against people who have enough English to do the job, but for whom English is their second language