Systemic bias

Systemic bias is the inherent tendency of a process to support particular outcomes. The term generally refers to human systems such as institutions. Systemic bias is related to and overlaps conceptually with institutional bias and structural bias, and the terms are often used interchangeably. According to Oxford Reference, institutional bias is "a tendency for the procedures and practices of particular institutions to operate in ways which result in certain social groups being advantaged or favoured and others being disadvantaged or devalued." In some contexts, institutional, systemic, and structural bias can lead to institutional racism, which is a type of racism that is integrated into the laws, norms, and regulations of a society or establishment. Structural bias, in turn, has been defined more specifically in reference to racial inequities as "the normalized and legitimized range of policies, practices, and attitudes that routinely produce cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for minority populations". The issues of systemic bias are dealt with extensively in the field of industrial organization economics. Cognitive bias is inherent in the experiences, loyalties, and relationships of people in their daily lives, and new biases are constantly being discovered and addressed on both an ethical and political level. For example, the goal of affirmative action in the United States is to counter biases concerning gender, race, and ethnicity, by opening up institutional participation to people with a wider range of backgrounds, and hence a wider range of points of view. In India, the system of Scheduled Castes and Tribes intends to address systemic bias caused by the controversial caste system, a system centered on organized discrimination based upon one's ancestry, not unlike the system that affirmative action aims to counter. Both the scheduling system and affirmative action mandate the hiring of citizens from within designated groups.