Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Does So-called Diversity Training Work?

If the goal is to harass someone so they don't challenge your leftie beliefs, then perhaps.  Otherwise:

Unfortunately, there’s little evidence-backed consensus about which sorts of diversity programmes work, and why, and there have been long-standing concerns in some quarters that these programmes don’t do much at all, or that they could actually be harmful. In part because of this dearth of evidence, the market for pro-diversity interventions is a bit of a Wild West with regard to quality.

For a new paper in PNAS, a prominent team of researchers, including Katherine Milkman, Angela Duckworth, and Adam Grant of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, partnered with a large global organisation to measure the real-world impact of the researchers’ own anti-bias intervention, designed principally to “promote inclusive attitudes and behaviors toward women, whereas a secondary focus was to promote the inclusion of other underrepresented groups (e.g., racial minorities).” The results were mixed at best – and unfortunately there are good reasons to be sceptical that even the more positive results are as positive as they seem.

I found this comment interesting:

Specifically, results from the gender IAT suggest that women are more implicitly biased against women than men are, that this is the case at every point on the political spectrum, and that within many subgroups, political liberals are more biased against women than conservatives.  

Doesn't surprise me at all.  Too many women I've worked with over the years have told me exactly the same thing.

3 comments:

  1. Anna A4:50 PM

    Count me in with the other women who are prejudiced against women. I've had 11 bosses in my career, with 2 of them being women. They rank at the bottom of my personal list of supervisor quality.

    I am fairly close to several of the women I work with now, but both of them are working in what is normally a male dominated area; i.e shipping and purchasing of chemicals, and other things that a factory needs.

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  2. Anna-I agree. Male principals and coworkers were always willing to divide responsibilities and glory. In working with the recent young women in the field, they are great at setting up whispering campaigns and dumping work they'd prefer not to do into the laps of others. I had one teacher who refused to teach entry level courses even though everyone else in the department, including me as department head, taught entry level students. If I had a disagreement with male coworkers, we were able to sit and discuss. When I disagreed with a female worker, they'd go behind my back to a friendly assistant principal and plant rumors. It's part of the reason I retired early.

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  3. When I was a senior in college the woman who supervised internships and job placement lost me a dream job. How? Apparently Bell Labs, who were attempting to hire women to fill a quota, contacted the little college I attended asking if there were any women math or physics majors who would be interested in interviewing. As I said, it was a very small school, and there were only two female seniors in those disciplines at the time. So what did this career counselor do? She told them not to bother since there were only two of us! We only found out about it after the fact. We would have been happy to drive to Boise State University to interview if necessary. Wretched woman didn't even have the decency to give us a heads up.

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