Why Diversity Training Fails

Diversity training is all the rage. Even staid corporations are hiring diversity trainers to help their employees overcome their implicit racial bias. 

It might be all the rage this year, but, in truth, Americans have been subjected to one or another form of anti-racism training for decades now.

There is, as the book says, nothing new under the sun. To be more precise, the book of Ecclesiastes says:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

This means that diversity training has been widely studied. All of the research shows that it does not work. David Brooks reported on it in the New York Times:

One of the most studied examples of this flawed model is racial diversity training. Over the last few decades, most large corporations and other institutions have begun racial diversity programs to combat the bias and racism pervasive in organizational life. The courses teach people about bias, they combat stereotypes and they encourage people to assume the perspectives of others in disadvantaged groups.

These programs are obviously well intended, and they often describe systemic racism accurately, but the bulk of the evidence, though not all of it, suggests they don’t reduce discrimination. Firms that use such courses see no increase in managerial diversity. Sometimes they see an increase — not a decrease — in minority employee turnover.

Quite true. It is difficult to reduce discrimination by enhancing everyone’s awareness of discrimination, and of race. These programs think of human interactions in racial terms. Why would anyone imagine that they are going to render people color blind.

In addition, the programs are intrinsically divisive. They divide the group into oppressors and victims. They accuse one group of exploiting and abusing another. They attack the pride of those who have been more successful, telling them that their success was ill gotten.

Brooks continues:

Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev offered a clear summary of the research in a 2018 essay in Anthropology Now. One meta-analysis of 985 studies of anti-bias interventions found little evidence that these programs reduced bias. Other studies sometimes do find a short-term change in attitudes, but very few find a widespread change in actual behavior.

Dobbin and Kalev offer a few reasons these programs generally don’t work as intended. First, “short-term educational interventions in general do not change people.” This is as true for worker safety courses as it is for efforts to combat racism. Second, some researchers argue that the training activates stereotypes in people’s minds rather than eliminates them. Third, training can make people complacent, thinking that because they went through the program they’ve solved the problem.

Fourth, the mandatory training makes many white participants feel left out, angry and resentful, actually decreasing their support for workplace diversity. Fifth, people don’t like to be told what to think, and may rebel if they feel that they’re being pressured to think a certain way.

The last points deserve emphasis. People don’t like being told what to think, and these programs insist that there is only one right way to think. Presumably, if a white person considers that a black person is underperforming on the job, the only possible explanation is racism. The fault for underperformance will be white racism.

The programs do not allow each worker to be judged by his merits. They want to reduce everything to race. 

Brooks is happy to accept that bias exists, but he notes that diversity training can be counterproductive:

Implicit bias is absolutely real. The problem is that courses to reduce its effects don’t seem to work. As Greenwald told Knowable Magazine: “I see most implicit bias training as window dressing that looks good both internally to an organization and externally, as if you’re concerned and trying to do something. But it can be deployed without actually achieving anything, which makes it in fact counterproductive.”

Among the reasons it can be counterproductive is the simple fact that white people will feel threatened. They will do their best to avoid contact with people who can constitute a threat to their careers. And they will certainly not be inclined to speak openly and honestly with people who might report them for being racist.

Diversity training does not make black workers part of the team, to be held to the same standards as everyone else. It makes them a potentially disruptive force, a force that will happily shred the cohesion of the workplace in order to bring about the advent of something called social justice. Thus, diversity training will imply that blacks are less trustworthy, less dedicated to the company, less interested in the corporate bottom line and more concerned with promoting social justice.

As for the solution, Brooks offers this:

People change when they are put in new environments, in permanent relationship with diverse groups of people. Their embodied minds adapt to the environments in a million different ways we will never understand or be able to plan. Decades ago, the social psychologist Gordon Allport wrote about the contact hypothesis, that doing life together with people of other groups can reduce prejudice and change minds. It’s how new emotional bonds are formed, how new conceptions of who is “us” and who is “them” come into being.

The superficial way to change minds and behavior doesn’t seem to work, to bridge either racial, partisan or class lines. Real change seems to involve putting bodies from different groups in the same room, on the same team and in the same neighborhood. That’s national service programs. That’s residential integration programs across all lines of difference. That’s workplace diversity, equity and inclusion — permanent physical integration, not training.

This points to a more fundamental vision of social change, but it is a hard-won lesson from a bitterly divisive year.

And yet, this too has been tried, and has hardly succeeded. Witness the efforts to forcibly integrate American public schools. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam showed that people who live in muticulturally diverse neighborhoods do not tend to integrate-- they tend to avoid each other, to hunker down. 

The sad conclusion is that all of the enhanced awareness of racism is likely to fuel more racism. Preaching the gospel of anti-racism and making people more acutely aware of their unconscious racism is more the problem than the solution.

Besides, if companies are now going to try to solve the nation’s racism problem by hiring and promoting more members of minority groups, the truth will remain-- these people will need to perform in their new jobs. And, sadly or not, when someone is perceived to have been hired or promoted to fill a diversity quota, he or she will not command the same respect as will someone who has worked his or her way up the ladder.

As Shelby Steele argued a couple of decades ago, in relation to affirmative action college admissions programs, these programs cast doubt on the achievements of anyone who might have benefited from them-- thus heightening, not diminishing, racial bias.