A professor of psychology named Betsy Levy Paluck wrote an opinion piece Monday about her research into corporate diversity training. As she points out, corporations have invested massively in this kind of DEI training especially over the last two years but no one can really say if it’s doing any good or, alternatively, doing more harm than good.
In early June 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests flowered across the United States following the murder of George Floyd, businesses and other institutions rushed to enhance their diversity efforts. Chief diversity officer hires tripled among the largest publicly traded companies, enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion offerings for which U.S. companies paid an estimated $3.4 billion to outside firms that year.
What have we achieved with all this effort? In 2022, this question has special significance, as measures to increase diversity and racial equity have come under political attack, often by people who believe those shouldn’t be goals in the first place. But even among people who believe in the basic mission, common questions about diversity training have shifted from “Which training is best?” to “Is the training even a good idea?” and “Does the training have negative effects?”
That last link goes to a Vice story published last year which was definitely in the “more harm than good” camp.
By the time her boss hired a diversity consultant to council staff on equity in the workplace, [Nakia] Wallace was already on edge. Her organization was not immune to the systemic inequities that are often ingrained within office culture—the segregated hierarchy of all-white executives, the reports of pay disparities and passed over promotions for Black and Latino staffers. But it was the workshop session, led by a white out-of-town consultant, that was the final straw for Wallace. In a lesson on extending compassion and empathy to others, one of the trainer’s entreaties was so outrageous that several workers stormed away from their laptops in anger: She wanted people to understand that Hitler wasn’t always a bad person.
“She even said: ‘When you get to know Hitler, when you read about Hitler, you realize that he was made into the person that he was,’” Wallace recalled.
But the problem goes beyond inexperienced and hapless trainers. Some evidence suggests the training itself either doesn’t work or may even backfire.
Research into the efficacy of workplace diversity programs have consistently shown disappointing—if not damning—results. In a study of more than 800 large and mid-sized companies, sociologists Alexandra Kalev of Tel Aviv University and Frank Dobbin of Harvard University, found that efforts to increase diversity within workforces through implicit bias training and workshops “failed spectacularly.”
Five years after implementing the training curriculum, companies saw little change in the share of white women, Black men, or Hispanics represented in managerial positions. In fact, the proportion of Black women in those roles actually decreased by an average of 9 percent, while Asian representation for men and women also dropped between 4 percent and 5 percent, respectively.
Getting back to Betsy Paluck, she concedes that her own research shows there’s no clear evidence these training sessions work.
Last year, my colleagues and I published a comprehensive review of the prejudice reduction literature. We included only program evaluations that used random assignment and control groups, as you would use to check the effectiveness and safety of a drug. Out of hundreds of studies evaluating prejudice reduction programming from the past decade, only two large studies tracked the effects of diversity training…
Since our review, despite the surge in diversity programming, there have been only a handful of additional studies. In sum, we don’t have good evidence for what works. We’re treating a pandemic of discrimination and racial and religious resentment with untested drugs.
She goes on to say that the main reason there are so few studies on the effects of diversity trainings is that corporate CEO’s don’t really want to know. The point of these trainings is to show that you’re doing something progressive. But if research were to demonstrate the trainings don’t produce anything of value (or actually make things worse) that would be bad news for CEO’s who’ve gone all in on DEI as a corporate imperative. Better to just not know.
Except of course it’s not better to just not know. That’s especially true if, as Vice suggests, the real impact of these trainings is to further balkanize people and make them less comfortable about talking to people from other racial groups out of fear of microaggressing someone.
In my view, the stories about poor trainers embarrassing themselves are really beside the point. The NY Times wrote the best story yet published on this topic more than two years ago. If you haven’t read it I highly recommend it. The Times interviewed some of the top DEI trainers including Robin DiAngelo. What they found was a collection of anti-capitalist, anti-rationalist, anti-excellence tropes all of which were intended to counteract ideas negatively (and falsely) attributed to “white culture.”
Running slightly beneath or openly on the surface of DiAngelo’s and Singleton’s teaching is a set of related ideas about the essence and elements of white culture. For DiAngelo, the elements include the “ideology of individualism,” which insists that meritocracy is mostly real, that hard work and talent will be justly rewarded. White culture, for her, is all about habits of oppressive thought that are taken for granted and rarely perceived, let alone questioned. One “unnamed logic of Whiteness,” she wrote with her frequent co-author, the education professor Ozlem Sensoy, in a 2017 paper published in The Harvard Educational Review, “is the presumed neutrality of White European Enlightenment epistemology.” The paper is an attempt to persuade universities that if they want to diversify their faculties, they should put less weight on conventional hiring criteria. The modern university, it says, “with its ‘experts’ and its privileging of particular forms of knowledge over others (e.g., written over oral, history over memory, rationalism over wisdom)” has “validated and elevated positivistic, White Eurocentric knowledge over non-White, Indigenous and non-European knowledges.” Such academic prose isn’t the language of DiAngelo’s workshops or book, but the idea of a society rigged at its intellectual core underpins her lessons…
With DiAngelo, my worries led us to discuss her Harvard Educational Review paper, which cited “rationalism” as a white criterion for hiring, a white qualification that should be reconsidered. Shouldn’t we be hiring faculty, I asked her, who fully possess, prize and can impart strong reasoning skills to students, because students will need these abilities as a requirement for high-paying, high-status jobs?
In answering, she returned to the theme of unconscious white privilege, comparing it to the way right-handed people are unaware of how frequently the world favors right-handedness. I pulled us away from the metaphorical, giving the example of corporate law as a lucrative profession in which being hired depends on acute reasoning. She replied that if a criterion “consistently and measurably leads to certain people” being excluded, then we have to “challenge” the criterion. “It’s the outcome,” she emphasized; the result indicated the racism.
Then she said abruptly, “Capitalism is so bound up with racism. I avoid critiquing capitalism — I don’t need to give people reasons to dismiss me. But capitalism is dependent on inequality, on an underclass. If the model is profit over everything else, you’re not going to look at your policies to see what is most racially equitable.”
This is what’s coming from one of the most popular and highly praised diversity trainers out there. I do not think there’s any way in which spending time with Robin DiAngelo is likely to benefit anyone or any company. She is telling you that she wants your company to be less successful and that anti-capitalism is wrapped up in her outlook. Believe her.
If you’re a CEO or know a CEO, encourage them to read the NY Times piece linked above. Hopefully that will give them second thoughts about whatever nonsense they are getting from their in house DEI staffers.
Finally, it should go without saying that there is still real racism in the world and that means there’s a need for corporate efforts to produce basic fairness and not to leave anyone out because of race, sex or other factors people can’t change. But there’s a vast gulf of difference between seeking equality of opportunity based on recognizing excellence and expertise and the kind of equity nonsense that is the focus of DEI trainers.
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