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In recent decades the term minority has taken on a new meaning among the politically correct, being used to refer to a group with which they perceive to be worthy of special preferential treatment. For instance, while numerically women outnumber men in most societies, they can be said in politically correct terms to be a minority, given their claim of inferior treatment compared to men. Some find this usage to be unhelpful or inaccurate.

A majority is a sub-group that outnumbers non-members in any particular group, or, in the politically correct sense of the word, has traditionally higher social status.

In the politics of some nations, a minority is an ethnic group that is recognized as such by respective laws of their country of habitation and therefore has some rights that ethnic groups not so recognized don't have (for example, its members might have the right to education and/or communication with the government in their mother tongue).

Not every ethnic group that is a minority in number is a "minority" in the political sense of the word: some are too small or too indistinct to validate costs of providing preferences, and some are so large or historically or otherwise important that they are one of constitutive nation s. As an example, see nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In general, most large modern governments prefer to assume the people they rule are all members of the same ethnic group rather than separate, as in the former Yugoslavia.

There are controversial issues about both declaring minorities and the of amount of their priveleges. Some claim minorities are not given enough rights while some claim minorities demand special rights amounting to preferential discriminationTo discriminate is to make a distinction. There are several meanings of the word, including statistical discrimination, or the actions of a circuit called a discriminator. This article addresses the most common meaning of the word, social, racial, religio, perhaps even on a path to separatismPolitical separatism is a movement to obtain sovereignty and split a territory or group of people (usually a people with a distinctive national consciousness) from one another (or one nation from another; a colony from the metropolis). Separatist movement or supremacism. Some hold groups normally termed "minority" and "majority" groups to actually be completely distinct racial or ethnic groups who primarily share a common government. Such questions of identity have been considered important since the European Empires of the nineteenth century ruled large swaths of africa and asia containing either many different peoples or many different minorities, depending on one's point of view.

One particularly controversial issue is positive discrimination: the idea that (either social or legal) minorities should be given more privileges then the majority. There is also the concept of reverse discriminationReverse discrimination is a colloquial term used to describe discriminatory policies or acts that benefit a historically socially undominant and/or minority group, rather than the historically socially dominant and/or majority group. The term "reverse dis, where the minority is given a status seen as superior to that of the majority, such as when minority status is used to give preference for acceptance to a universityA university is an institution of higher education and of research, which grants academic degrees. A university provides both tertiary and quaternary education. University is derived from the Latin universitas meaning corporation since the first medieval, or to gain employment over an equally qualified non-minority. In the United StatesThe United States of America also referred to as the United States U. America ¹ or the States is a federal republic in central North America, stretching from the Atlantic in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west. It shares land borders with Canada in this is referred to as affirmative actionAffirmative action ( U. English), also called positive discrimination or reverse discrimination ( British English) or employment equity is conciously choosing people who have traditionally been discriminated against. This consists of preferential access t.