Systemic bias, also called institutional bias, is the inherent tendency of a process to support particular outcomes. The term generally refers to human systems such as institutions; the equivalent bias in non-human systems is often called systematic bias, and leads to systematic error in measurements or estimates. The issues of systemic bias are dealt with extensively in the field of industrial organization economics.
In human institutions
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. However, without sufficient restrictions based upon the actual socio-economic standing of the recipients of the aid provided, these types of system can allegedly result in the unintentional institutionalization of a reversed form of the same systemic bias, which works against the goal of rendering institutional participation open to people with a wider range of backgrounds.
Major causes
The study of systemic bias as part of the field titled organizational behavior in industrial organization economics is studied in several principle modalities in both non-profit and for-profit institutions. The issue of concern is that patterns of behavior may develop within large institutions which become harmful to the productivity and viability of the larger institutions from which they develop. The three major categories of study for maladaptive organizational behavior and systemic bias are counterproductive work behavior, human resource mistreatment, and the amelioration of stress-inducing behavior.
is the extent to which a supervisor engages in a pattern of behavior that harms subordinates.
Bullying
Although definitions of bullying vary, it involves a repeated pattern of harmful behaviors directed towards an individual.
Incivility
consists of low-intensity discourteous and rude behavior with ambiguous intent to harm that violates norms for appropriate behavior in the workplace.
Sexual harassment
is behavior that denigrates or mistreats an individual due to his or her gender, creates an offensive workplace, and interferes with an individual being able to do their job.
Stress
concerns the imbalance between the demands and resources that help cope with these demands.
The difference between the wordssystemic and systematic is somewhat ambiguous. "Systemic bias" and the older, more common expression "systematic bias" are often used to refer to the same thing; some users seek to draw a distinction between them, suggesting that systemic bias is most frequently associated with human systems, and related to favoritism. In engineering and computational mechanics, the wordbias is sometimes used as a synonym of systematic error. In this case, the bias is referred to the result of a measurement or computation, rather than to the measurement instrument or computational method. Some authors try to draw a distinction between systemic and systematic corresponding to that between unplanned and planned, or to that between arising from the characteristics of a system and from an individual flaw. In a less formal sense, systemic biases are sometimes said to arise from the nature of the interworkings of the system, whereas systematic biases stem from a concerted effort to favor certain outcomes. Consider the difference between affirmative action compared to racism and caste.
