Diversity Training Fails

Harvard professor Frank Dobbin has done a comprehensive analysis of corporate diversity hiring. Along with Tel Aviv University professor Alexandra Kalev, he explained in the Harvard Business Review, that the standard programs designed to produce more equity, involving diversity programs and mind control, have failed.

Of course, they take it for granted, without providing any evidence, that the women and minority candidates are just as good, just as educated as the male candidates who were said to outperform them. When they say that marginalized groups are just as well educated as the white males who gain most of the promotions, they fail to notice that the educational system is rigged to give good grades to some groups, regardless.

Someone who received straight As in Ethnic Studies or Women's Studies is not as valuable to a company as someone who received straight As in physics or chemistry.

Moreover, Dobbin and Kalev seem to believe that equality is a good in itself. In some cases it apparently works well. In others it does not. In truth, minority group members who adopt corporate culture tend to be treated fairly. Those who do not are also treated fairly, but they do not advance as quickly.

And, when talking about women, Dobbin and Kalev ignore child rearing as a mitigating factor. It might be that mothers need to spend more time at home with their children, and choose to do so. One cannot make a consequential analysis without taking this factor into account.

As it happens, most companies over the past two decades have tried to solve the problem by diversity training and threats. Obviously, as we and many others have noted, these approaches do not work. Making it all a function of guilt and punishment breeds resentment and makes it appear that minority and female staff did not earn their way.

Dobbin and Kalev explain that American companies have largely failed to diversify:

But on balance, equality isn’t improving in financial services or elsewhere. Although the proportion of managers at U.S. commercial banks who were Hispanic rose from 4.7% in 2003 to 5.7% in 2014, white women’s representation dropped from 39% to 35%, and Black men’s from 2.5% to 2.3%. The numbers were even worse in investment banks (though that industry is shrinking, which complicates the analysis). Among all U.S. companies with 100 or more employees, the proportion of Black men in management increased just slightly—from 3% to 3.3%—from 1985 to 2014. White women saw bigger gains from 1985 to 2000—rising from 22% to 29% of managers—but their numbers haven’t budged since then. Even in Silicon Valley, where many leaders tout the need to increase diversity for both business and social justice reasons, bread-and-butter tech jobs remain dominated by white men.

Of course, the authors do not consider alternative explanations, of the sort, that men are more likely to want to do tech jobs. Strangely, they fail to notice a point that we have occasionally made, namely that the important tech jobs in Silicon Valley are now more likely to be held by Asian males, by people who were not educated in America.

Dobbin and Kalev suggest that companies have adopted the wrong approach:

It shouldn’t be surprising that most diversity programs aren’t increasing diversity. Despite a few new bells and whistles, courtesy of big data, companies are basically doubling down on the same approaches they’ve used since the 1960s—which often make things worse, not better. Firms have long relied on diversity training to reduce bias on the job, hiring tests and performance ratings to limit it in recruitment and promotions, and grievance systems to give employees a way to challenge managers. Those tools are designed to preempt lawsuits by policing managers’ thoughts and actions. Yet laboratory studies show that this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out. As social scientists have found, people often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy. Try to coerce me to do X, Y, or Z, and I’ll do the opposite just to prove that I’m my own person.

Lawsuit avoidance and force feeding… these make it appear that these candidates did not earn their way. Worse yet, anyone who says otherwise will be threatened.

Guilt tripping managers does not work. 

Decades of social science research point to a simple truth: You won’t get managers on board by blaming and shaming them with rules and reeducation. Let’s look at how the most common top-down efforts typically go wrong.

Dobbin and Kalev make an interesting point. When people are taught that there are right and wrong answers to test questions, they will go along to get along. They will give the presumably right answers and forget about it the next day.

It turns out that while people are easily taught to respond correctly to a questionnaire about bias, they soon forget the right answers. The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash. Nonetheless, nearly half of midsize companies use it, as do nearly all the Fortune 500.

Of course, these efforts seem to presuppose that the minority and female candidates cannot make it on their own. Thus, regardless of how much you try to control minds, in the end reality pushes back.

But five years after instituting required training for managers, companies saw no improvement in the proportion of white women, Black men, and Hispanics in management, and the share of Black women actually decreased by 9%, on average, while the ranks of Asian American men and women shrank by 4% to 5%. Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance—and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward.

Deprive people of their ability to make up their own minds, force them to mouth the party line, and they will resent you.

In one study white subjects read a brochure critiquing prejudice toward Blacks. When people felt pressure to agree with it, the reading strengthened their bias against Blacks. When they felt the choice was theirs, the reading reduced bias.

But managers don’t like being told that they can’t hire whomever they please, and our research suggests that they often use the tests selectively.

Unfortunately, Dobbin and Kalev do not consider whether or not the hiring and firing decisions have something to do with competence, and with the ability to work together in a cohesive group. And they do not question whether some people do not fit in because they fail to adopt the corporate culture or because no one has the right to criticize them.

In the military such was not the case. Back in the day, during World War II, Gen. Eisenhower integrated the ranks, but those who were promoted wore the same uniform as everyone else. No one told anyone that the black soldiers needed special treatment. No one suggested that they were there to fill a diversity quota:

High casualties left General Dwight Eisenhower understaffed, and he asked for Black volunteers for combat duty. When Harvard sociologist Samuel Stouffer, on leave at the War Department, surveyed troops on their racial attitudes, he found that whites whose companies had been joined by Black platoons showed dramatically lower racial animus and greater willingness to work alongside Blacks than those whose companies remained segregated. Stouffer concluded that whites fighting alongside Blacks came to see them as soldiers like themselves first and foremost. The key, for Stouffer, was that whites and Blacks had to be working toward a common goal as equals—hundreds of years of close contact during and after slavery hadn’t dampened bias.

So, America’s efforts to diversify the world of corporate management have largely failed. It would be nice if Dobbin and Kalev and other serious intellectuals would consider the simple fact that companies are in the business of making a profit, not in the business of producing an equitable workforce. They take it for granted that the minority and females candidates who are passed over are just as good as the candidates who are hired and promoted. In Silicon Valley, for instance, such is not the case.

At the least, we are not going to solve anything by accusing people of being bigots.

Strategies for controlling bias—which drive most diversity efforts—have failed spectacularly since they were introduced to promote equal opportunity. Black men have barely gained ground in corporate management since 1985. White women haven’t progressed since 2000. It isn’t that there aren’t enough educated women and minorities out there—both groups have made huge educational gains over the past two generations. The problem is that we can’t motivate people by forcing them to get with the program and punishing them if they don’t.

The numbers sum it up. Your organization will become less diverse, not more, if you require managers to go to diversity training, try to regulate their hiring and promotion decisions, and put in a legalistic grievance system.

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