How do we investigate bias? Bias is sometimes used as a soft word for discrimination, but at the end of the day, we are trying to measure if people are treated differently, either by a system that’s implemented or by direct managerial input of a human. So, regardless of if it’s a system or a person, the idea of bias is that, because of the way things are dealt out or because of the way a system is built, certain people are treated differently as an outcome. And so, regardless of whether it is a system or a person or a system implemented by a person, we need to boil it down to a measurable thing that we can say, outcomes are disproportionately better for or worse for people who fit into this category. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was intentionally built that way, but that the outcome itself is disproportionate based on some protected class.
