Dictionary · Addressing Harmful Bias and Eliminating Discrimination in Health Professions Learning Environments: An Urgent Challenge.

Harmful bias can be either conscious or unconscious. Unconscious, also known as implicit bias, involves associations outside conscious awareness that lead to a negative evaluation of a person on the basis of characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or physical ability. Discrimination is behavior; discriminatory actions perpetrated by individuals or institutions refer to inequitable treatment of members of certain social groups that results in social advantages or disadvantages