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The neutrality of this article is disputed.
In sociology and in voting theory, a minority is a group that is outnumbered by persons who do not belong to it. This can be used to refer to people of a different language, nationality, religion, culture, lifestyle or most any characteristic.
In recent decades the term minority has taken on a new meaning amoung the politically correct, being used to refer to a group with which they percieve to be a lower social status. 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 that they have inferior social rights compared to men. Some find this usage to be unhelpful or innaccurate.
A majority is a group that outnumbers its non-members, or, in the politically correct sense of the word, has a higher social status.
In the politics of some nation's, a minority is an ethnic group that is recognized as such by respective laws of their home country and therefore has some rights that ethnic groups not so recognised don't have (for example, its members might have education and/or communication with the government in their mother tongue). Not every ethnic group that is a minority in social sense is a minority in political sense: some are too small or too indistinct to validate costs of providing these rights, and some are so large or historically or otherwise important that they are one of constitutive nations. For example, although oversea Chinese people are outnumbered by local residents, they tend to dominate economy and politics.