Today’s Washington Post reports on a new study confirming what many people already suspected, conventional wisdom, or at least practice, to the contrary notwithstanding.
Most diversity training efforts at American companies are ineffective and even counterproductive in increasing the number of women and minorities in managerial positions, according to an analysis that turns decades of conventional wisdom, government policy and court rulings on their head.
A comprehensive review of 31 years of data from 830 mid-size to large U.S. workplaces found that the kind of diversity training exercises offered at most firms were followed by a 7.5 percent drop in the number of women in management. The number of black, female managers fell by 10 percent, and the number of black men in top positions fell by 12 percent. Similar effects were seen for Latinos and Asians.
The analysis did not find that all diversity training is useless. Rather, it showed that mandatory programs — often undertaken mainly with an eye to avoiding liability in discrimination lawsuits — were the problem….
“When attendance is voluntary, diversity training is followed by an increase in managerial diversity,” said Alexandra Kalev, a sociologist at the University of Arizona, who led the research. “Most employers, however, force their managers and workers to go through training, and this is the least effective option in terms of increasing diversity. . . . Forcing people to go through training creates a backlash against diversity.”
American businesses spend between $200 million and $300 million a year on diversity training. It would seem that money could spent on programs a good deal more useful, such as scholarship programs, recruitment, etc.
But wait. If mandatory diversity training creates “a backlash against diversity,” I wonder if mandatory diversity itself — of the sort that universities and other organizations routinely impose on themselves — also creates a backlash against diversity and, even more ominous, against the “diverse” beneficiaries of this racial beneficence.
All anyone has to do is look at how conducts diversity training and who are the large companies is in charge of arranging it and enforcing the mandatory part.
In my experience, it is the domain of middle age and older black women. They usually come off as bigots who could not care less about Hispanics, Asians, or white women.
I always found it odd that right after the Gratz and Grutter decision, that I had to attend diversity training with an instructor who had not heard of either Supreme Court decision.
Diversity training harms employers and employees, triggers lawsuits by both white and minority employees, causes racial and sexual strife in the workplace, and undermines civil rights and civil liberties.
That’s what I explain in a post at my blog, in which I also comment on this Washington Post article showing that there is no benefit to diversity training. (See my Jan. 21 post at OpenMarket.org.)
While the Post article was informative, it missed the mark in one respect: it wrongly said that the Supreme Court had ruled that diversity training can help defeat a discrimination suit.
That’s erroneous. There is no legal benefit to generalized diversity training.
The Supreme Court said that sexual harassment prevention training can in some cases help defeat lawsuits, not that diversity training can.
And such harassment prevention training isn’t required: it’s just one potential element in an antidiscrimination policy that can help defeat punitive damages (see the Kolstad case) or liability for supervisory harassment that occurs (which otherwise might give rise to vicarious liability, see the Ellerth and Faragher cases).
Indeed, for claims of co-worker harassment, an employer doesn’t even really get much marginal benefit out of harassment prevention training, since a simple, well-publicized prohibition on harassment gets the same legal benefit. See, e.g., Bouton v. BMW (simple statement by employer that harassment was not tolerated, without any “training” or detailed explanation of what was harassment, sufficed to defeat liability where employee failed to give employer notice that harassment was occurring).