HotAir
The BBC published an interesting article today which points out that, despite its ubiquity among major companies, diversity training doesn’t really work. At least that’s what a lot of the research on the subject suggests. But if so, why are so many companies committed to going through the motions?
The article opens by pointing to a summary of research on the topic published in 2018 by Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin and Tel Aviv University sociologist Alexandra Kalev:
We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade, with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around. But they persist, worried about the optics of getting rid of training, concerned about litigation, unwilling to take more difficult but consequential steps or simply in the thrall of glossy training materials and their purveyors. That colleges and universities in the United States persist in offering training to faculty and students, and even mandate it (29% of all schools require faculty to undergo training), is particularly surprising given that the research on the poor performance of training comes out of academia. Imagine university health centers continuing to prescribe vitamin C for the common cold...
...We’re describing a massive institutional effort which arguably produces very little or nothing. But so long as companies see legal benefits to holding the sessions, they’ll continue to do so. And as long as there is money to be made filling that corporate need, there will by companies jockeying to collect those dollars |