https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/opinion/dei-trainings-effective.html
How in the hell did this get published by the NYT?? Facts, common sense, AND logical reasoning in one article?Impossible!
How in the hell did this get published by the NYT?? Facts, common sense, AND logical reasoning in one article?Impossible!
Quote:
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.
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Dr. Paluck's team found just two large experimental studies in the previous decade that attempted to evaluate the effects of diversity trainings and met basic quality benchmarks. Other researchers have been similarly unimpressed. "We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade," wrote the sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in 2018, "with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around." (To be fair, not all of these critiques apply as sharply to voluntary diversity trainings.)
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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.
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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.
Just ask employees at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which had to issue an apology after it posted an Okunesque graphic that presented rational thought, hard work and "emphasis on scientific method" as attributes of "white culture."
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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.
