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Bias Testing and Fairness Guide

Fairness testing is a control. This guide gives security, risk, and compliance teams a repeatable process to evaluate AI systems for bias, document results, and demonstrate governance to auditors.

A practical checklist

Define the fairness objective
  • What decision is the model influencing (hiring, lending, support triage, fraud flags)?
  • What harm are you trying to prevent (denials, delays, false accusations, differential quality of service)?
  • What populations are in scope (customers, employees, applicants)?
Choose metrics
  • Group parity metrics (selection rate, false positive/negative rates)
  • Calibration/score reliability across groups
  • Distribution shift monitoring
  • For GenAI: toxicity, stereotyping, and refusal consistency
Design test datasets
  • Collect representative samples for each group (or use controlled synthetic data where appropriate)
  • Define ground truth labels and reviewer guidance
  • Log dataset provenance and consent/collection constraints
Run evaluations
  • Evaluate metrics overall and per group
  • Test on edge cases and adversarial prompts (for GenAI)
  • Repeat across model versions and configuration changes
Document results
  • Record metrics, thresholds, and pass/fail criteria
  • Attach evidence (dashboards, notebooks, test logs)
  • Summarise limitations and known failure modes
Remediate and retest
  • Apply mitigations (data balance, post-processing, policy controls, guardrails)
  • Rerun the full evaluation suite
  • Implement monitoring to detect regression

What to include in a fairness report

Model/version and configuration
Intended use + out-of-scope use
Groups evaluated and data sources
Metrics and thresholds
Results and identified gaps
Mitigations applied
Residual risk acceptance
Monitoring plan and alert thresholds
Complete AI governance library

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Every policy, checklist, and playbook a security or GRC team needs to build a defensible AI governance program. One email, one ZIP, ready to adapt.

  • 29 .docx files
  • 1.1 MB total
  • Updated June 2026
  • NIST AI RMF · ISO 42001 · EU AI Act aligned

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