For example, you could use the Mann-Whitney U test to understand whether attitudes towards pay discrimination, where attitudes are measured on an ordinal scale, differ based on gender (i.e., your dependent variable would be 'attitudes towards pay discrimination' and your independent variable would be 'gender', which has two groups: 'male' and 'female'). The Mann-Whitney U test is used to compare differences between two independent groups when the dependent variable is either ordinal or continuous, but not normally distributed.
Mann-Whitney U Test using SPSS Statistics Introduction