Question

I'm currently working on a public health research paper about "structural bias, racism, and social inequity and their connections to poor health outcomes at the organizational, community, and societal levels." How are the three levels different from each other? What exactly is structural bias and is it the same as structural racism?

Answer 1

Difference between structural bias, racism, and social inequity

1) Structural bias is the bias against an individual or a group. It is refers to the systemic disadvantage of one social group compared to other groups with whom they coexist, and the term encompasses policy, law, governance, and culture and refers to race, ethnicity, gender or gender identity, class, sexual orientation, and other domains.

Bias is defined as the negative evaluation of one group and its members relative to another. This is of 2 types:

• Explicit bias requires that a person is aware of his/her evaluation of a group and believes that evaluation is accurate. I
• Implicit (unconscious) bias does not require an individual to be aware of their evaluations of a certain group and operates in an unintentional and unconscious form.

Structural bias in healthcare is systematic differences in the opportunities groups have to achieve optimal health, leading to unfair and avoidable differences in health outcomes. Mostly astructural bias restrict many people from reaching scope of opportunities they have for attaining their full health potential.

structural bias produce health inequities. Determinants these are the conditions in which people live, including access to good food, water, and housing; the quality of schools,workplaces, and neighborhoods; and the composition of social networks and nature of social relations. structural bias give rise to large and preventable differences in health metrics such as life expectancy beacuse it leads to unequal distribution of healthcare facilities among different social class or category of people. For example, Providing clean and safe resources for rich and unclean healthcare resources for poor.

2) Racism is the disparities based on race and ethnicity.Racial factors play an important role in structuring socioeconomic disparities therefore, addressing socioeconomic factors without addressing racism is unlikely to remedy these inequities. To fully address the impacts of racism it is important to address all aspects of racial inequity. Racism includes

individual level : – Pre-judgment, bias, stereotypes or generalizations about an individual or group based on race. The impacts of racism on individuals – white people and people of color (internalized privilege and oppression). Individual racism can result in illegal discrimination.

Institutionl level: - Policies, practice, and procedures that work to the benefit of certain race of  people and the detriment of people of color, usually unintentionally or inadvertently

structural level :- The interplay of policies, practices and programs of differing institutions which leads to adverse outcomes and conditions for communities of color compared to white communities that occurs within the context of racialized historical and cultural conditions.

3) Social inequality occurs when resources in a given society are distributed unevenly, typically through norms of allocation, that engender specific patterns along lines of socially defined categories of persons(race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, etc) . Social inequality usually implies to the lack of equality of outcome, but may alternatively be conceptualized in terms of the lack of equality of access to opportunity. Social inqualities in healthcare leads to health inequalities by unequal distribution of health resources based on social conditions in which people are born, grow, live work, etc

structural bias and structural racism

Individual racism is a personal belief in the superiority of one’s race over another. It is linked to racial prejudice and discriminatory behaviors, which can be an expression of implicit and explicit bias.

Racism can be expressed implicitly or explicitly and occurs when a certain group is targeted and discriminated against based on race. ButvStructural bias reflects the disparities. which not limited to race, it can be based on any factors such as wealth, income, justice, employment, housing, medicine,voting rights, education, and so on.