It’s also down to people taking the aggrieved (and often vocal) party’s word that a specific discriminatory act has taken place. That’s usually done out of empathy.

The problem we’re now seeing is that we’ve normalised baseless assertions to a point where they’re widely accepted as fact. And, worse still, they’ve been politicised in their misrepresented form.

A good example of this is the idea that there’s a significant discriminatory (key word) gender pay gap. In the UK this is repeated ad nauseam, and I suspect it’s the same in most other Western countries. Yet leading labour market economists (e.g. Claudia Goldin - http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender-pay-gap-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/) paint a completely different picture.

Yet the main narrative is determined not by economists, but by new academic fields such as ‘gender studies’, which have been proven to have far lower academic standards than most traditional fields of study.

The extent of the problems with listening to these people were exposed last year when a few academics managed to get ridiculous hoax articles into leading feminist and gender studies journals with ease.