What if Diversity Training Is Doing More Harm Than Good?

By Jesse Singal. Mr. Singal is the author of “The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills.” From The NY Times. Excerpts:

"There’s little evidence that many of these initiatives work. And the specific type of diversity training that is currently in vogue — mandatory training that blames dominant groups for D.E.I. problems — may well have a net negative effect on the outcomes managers claim to care about.

Over the years, social scientists who have conducted careful reviews of the evidence base for diversity training have frequently come to discouraging conclusions. Though diversity training workshops have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. The lack of evidence is “disappointing,” wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and her co-authors in a 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article, “considering the frequency with which calls for diversity training emerge in the wake of widely publicized instances of discriminatory conduct.”

Dr. Paluck’s team found just two large experimental studies in the previous decade that attempted to evaluate the effects of diversity training and met basic quality benchmarks. Other researchers have been similarly unimpressed."

"Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the D.E.I. climates of the organizations that pay for them.

That’s partly because any psychological intervention may turn out to do more harm than good. The psychologist Scott Lilienfeld made this point in an influential 2007 article in which he argued that certain interventions — including ones geared at fighting youth substance use, youth delinquency and PTSD — most likely fell into that category. In the case of D.E.I., Dr. Dobbin and Dr. Kalev warn that diversity training that is mandatory or that threatens dominant groups’ sense of belonging or makes them feel blamed may elicit negative backlash or exacerbate biases.

Many popular contemporary D.E.I. approaches meet these criteria. 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” training sessions are designed to make white participants uncomfortable. And microaggression training workshops 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 training sessions 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."

"Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture . . . posted an Okunesque graphic that presented rational thought, hard work and “emphasis on scientific method” as attributes of “white culture.”"

"If common diversity training definitively made institutions fairer or more inclusive in measurable ways, then one could argue it is worth it, backlash and mounting legal fees notwithstanding. But there’s little evidence that it does."

"Robert Livingston, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School . . .  suggested that it’s more important to accurately diagnose an organization’s specific problems with D.E.I. and to come up with concrete strategies for solving them than it is to attempt to change the attitudes of individual employees."

"The legwork it takes to understand and solve these problems isn’t necessarily glamorous. If you want more Black and Latino people in management roles at your large company, that might require gathering data on what percentage of applicants come from these groups, interviewing current Black and Latino managers on whether there are climate issues that could be contributing to the problem and possibly beefing up recruitment efforts at, say, business schools with high percentages of Black and Latino graduates. Even solving this one problem — and it’s a fairly common one — could take hundreds of hours of labor.

The truth, as Dr. Livingston pointed out, is that not every organization is up to this sort of task. Ticking a box and moving on can be the more attractive option."

"The history of diversity training sessions is, in a sense, a history of fads."