Facing Discrimination on Multiple Fronts at Work May Deepen Depression Risk

Young adults who experience more than one form of discrimination at work appear to face a dramatically elevated risk of depressive symptoms, according to a new study published in BMC Psychology. Researchers led by Tobias Weinmann of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München analyzed questionnaire data from 1,066 employed young adults in Germany and found that those reporting two or more types of workplace discrimination had nearly four times the odds of screening positive for depression compared with colleagues who reported no discrimination at all. The finding, drawn from one of the few studies to treat workplace discrimination as a cumulative exposure rather than a single event, adds weight to a growing body of evidence that the health costs of discrimination compound when multiple axes of prejudice intersect.

The data came from the third phase of the German Study on Occupational Allergy Risks, or SOLAR 3, a long-running follow-up of children originally recruited in the mid-1990s through the International Study on Asthma and Allergies in Childhood. By 2017 and 2018, when the latest survey wave was conducted, the participants had reached a mean age of 31.3 years, and 56.8 percent of them were women. Of the 1,066 participants who had held some form of employment, including internships, during the previous twelve months, nearly all had been born in Germany and more than half held a university degree. This relative homogeneity, the authors acknowledge, limits how far the results can be generalized to the entire workforce.

To measure exposure, the researchers adapted questions from the European Working Conditions Survey, asking participants whether, over the past year at work, they had been subjected to discrimination because of age, origin or ethnic background, nationality, sex, religion, disability, or sexual orientation. Each participant was assigned a score reflecting the number of discrimination types they reported. The results were striking in their asymmetry: 88.7 percent of participants reported no exposure to any form of workplace discrimination, while only 26 individuals, or 2.5 percent, reported two or more types. Discrimination because of sex was the most commonly reported form, cited by 6.1 percent of all participants and by 9.2 percent of the women surveyed.

Depressive symptoms were screened using the Patient Health Questionnaire-2, a validated two-item instrument that asks how often, over the previous two weeks, respondents have experienced little interest or pleasure in doing things and feeling down, depressed, or hopeless. Answers are scored on a four-point scale, and a total of three or more points triggers a positive screen. In this sample, 104 individuals, or 9.8 percent, screened positive for depression, a prevalence slightly below the roughly 12 percent reported for the German population aged 30 to 39 in the same period. The prevalence of depressive symptoms rose steadily with the number of discrimination types reported, climbing from 8.2 percent among the non-exposed to substantially higher levels among those reporting multiple forms.

The statistical core of the study is a multivariate logistic regression that estimated the odds of a positive depression screen as a function of the number of discrimination types experienced, adjusting for sex, study center, educational attainment, current form of occupation, and chronic work stress. Before adjustment for work stress, participants reporting two or more types of discrimination had more than six times the odds of depressive symptoms compared with the non-exposed reference group, an odds ratio of 6.31 with a 95 percent confidence interval stretching from 2.67 to 14.89. Exposure to a single type of discrimination was also associated with elevated odds, at an odds ratio of 2.74. After the researchers added work stress, measured with the validated Trier Inventory for the Assessment of Chronic Stress, to the model, the odds ratio for multiple discrimination fell to 3.92, with a confidence interval of 1.40 to 11.01, while the association for a single type attenuated and lost statistical significance.

The role of work stress in this relationship is one of the study’s most technically interesting aspects. The authors deliberately present two models because adjusting for work stress may constitute over-adjustment if chronic stress lies on the causal pathway between discrimination and depression. In other words, discrimination may partly exert its psychological damage by generating stress, and controlling for that stress would strip out part of the true effect. The attenuation from 6.31 to 3.92 after adjustment is consistent with such a pathway, but the authors are careful to note that the cross-sectional design cannot establish mediation. Each one-point increase in the work stress score was independently associated with a 12 percent increase in the odds of depressive symptoms, and participants without a university degree showed higher odds of a positive screen than degree holders.

Sensitivity analyses reinforced the dose-response pattern suggested by the main results. When the exposure was split into four categories, participants reporting three or more types of discrimination had an adjusted odds ratio of 10.28 for depressive symptoms, albeit with an extremely wide confidence interval reflecting the tiny number of such individuals. A linear regression treating the number of discrimination types as a continuous predictor found that each additional type was associated with an increase of roughly a quarter point on the PHQ-2 scale. In a subgroup analysis restricted to women, the association between multiple discrimination and depressive symptoms was even stronger, with an odds ratio of 6.66, though the authors caution that the small number of exposed men prevented a comparable male subgroup analysis and that the higher female estimate should not be read as conclusive evidence of a sex-specific effect.

Underlying the analysis is the allostatic load model, a framework from stress physiology that may explain how repeated social injury becomes biological damage. According to this model, chronic activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis in response to persistent stressors imposes a cumulative physiological cost, a dysregulation that can cascade into cardiovascular, metabolic, and psychiatric disease. Each additional form of discrimination, the researchers hypothesize, delivers another hit to this system, accelerating the shift from adaptive load to harmful overload. Prior studies have linked discrimination to measurable markers of allostatic load, including hair cortisol concentrations among people facing intersectional discrimination, lending biological plausibility to the association observed here.

The authors are candid about the limitations that temper their conclusions. The wide confidence intervals signal low statistical precision, the cross-sectional design rules out causal statements, and reverse causality remains possible: people experiencing depressive symptoms may be more likely to perceive or recall social interactions as discriminatory, a form of negative affectivity that could inflate the estimates. Self-reported measures on both exposure and outcome also raise the possibility of common method bias, and the study could not capture discrimination occurring outside work or the specific channels, whether hiring, promotion, pay, or interpersonal treatment, through which discrimination operated. The binary measurement of sex and the absence of data on sexual orientation further limited the analysis of intersecting identities.

Despite these caveats, the findings arrive at a politically charged moment. The authors argue that the accumulated evidence makes a clear case for strengthening anti-discrimination initiatives and workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, noting that inclusive policies have been identified as key components of well-being for transgender and gender-diverse employees and that anti-DEI backlash is likely to widen social and health inequities. With an estimated 12 percent of employees across the European Union reporting workplace discrimination and prevalence figures in the United States ranging from 11 to 25 percent depending on demographic group, the scale of the exposure is enormous. If the burden of depressive symptoms rises with each additional axis of discrimination, then the researchers conclude, measures to reduce or abolish workplace discrimination should be regarded not merely as matters of fairness but as concrete instruments of public mental health protection.

Subject of Research: The association between cumulative exposure to multiple types of workplace discrimination and depressive symptoms in young adults

Article Title: Multiple discrimination at work and depressive symptoms in young adults

Article References: Weinmann, T., Herbig, B., Forster, F., Wengenroth, L., Nowak, D., Vogelberg, C., & Radon, K. (2026). Multiple discrimination at work and depressive symptoms in young adults. BMC Psychology, 14(1), Article 1463. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05765-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05765-y

Keywords: workplace discrimination, depressive symptoms, mental health, occupational health, young adults, allostatic load, work stress, PHQ-2, intersectionality, logistic regression, Germany, BMC Psychology