Sensitivity Training Fails

Truth be told, it’s just another form of therapy. In the corporate world they call it sensitivity training, but it’s a form of group therapy, designed to gaslight staff into believing that equity programs are fair and balanced.

In fact, as long as different people are judged by different standards and are assumed to be playing by different rules, they will not be able to get along. All the sensitivity training in the world is not going to overcome the distortion introduced by diversity hiring and diversity promotion. 

So, the least surprising aspect of Jesse Singal’s New York Times op-ed is that anyone anywhere ever imagined that sensitivity training would ever work.

Anyway, for the corporate dimwits who are so quick to adopt the latest fad, the results are now in:

D.E.I. trainings are designed to help organizations become more welcoming to members of traditionally marginalized groups. Advocates make bold promises: Diversity workshops can foster better intergroup relations, improve the retention of minority employees, close recruitment gaps and so on. The only problem? There’s little evidence that many of these initiatives work. And the specific type of diversity training that is currently in vogue — mandatory trainings that blame dominant groups for D.E.I. problems — may well have a net-negative effect on the outcomes managers claim to care about.

This leads to the following conclusion:

If diversity trainings have no impact whatsoever, that would mean that perhaps billions of dollars are being wasted annually in the United States on these efforts. But there’s a darker possibility: Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the D.E.I. climates of the organizations that pay for them.

As for the content of these programs, it is clearly a bunch of critical race theory. It teaches white people that they are responsible for the underperformance of non-white people. It’s a massive guilt trip, one that makes whites resent non-whites.

They often seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary reunderstanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems. And they often blame white people — or their culture — for harming people of color. For example, the activist Tema Okun’s work cites concepts like objectivity and worship of the written word as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility” trainings are designed to make white participants uncomfortable. And microaggression trainings are based on an area of academic literature that claims, without quality evidence, that common utterances like “America is a melting pot” harm the mental health of people of color. Many of these trainings run counter to the views of most Americans — of any color — on race and equality. And they’re generating exactly the sort of backlash that research predicts.

So, Singal concludes, it’s a pricey fad.

The history of diversity trainings is, in a sense, a history of fads. Maybe the current crop will wither over time, new ones will sprout that are stunted by the same lack of evidence, and a decade from now someone else will write a version of this article. But it’s also possible that organizations will grow tired of throwing time and money at trainings where the upside is mostly theoretical and the potential downsides include unhappy employees, public embarrassment and even lawsuits. It’s possible they will realize that a true commitment to D.E.I. does not lend itself to easy solutions.