When Even the BBC Doubts...

The only surprise here is that the BBC reports this:

Most people who start a new company job know the drill. In addition to meetings and an office tour, orientation day typically includes sitting through a session or clicking through a set of virtual slides – with a quiz to follow – on diversity and sensitivity training. 

Ubiquitous in large workplaces across the globe, these company-wide sessions are staples at Fortune 500 companies and smaller organisations alike. “They're everywhere,” says Pamela Newkirk, the New York-based author of the book Diversity, Inc: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business. “Every major company… every major institution whether it’s academia or fashion – that seems to be the go-to strategy for dealing with the lack of diversity.” 

This training is so widespread that it’s developed into a lucrative industry. Yet research indicates that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training does very little to affect change within a workplace. 

“On average, the typical all-hands-on-deck, ‘everybody has to have diversity training’ – that typical format in big companies doesn't have any positive effects on any historically underrepresented groups like black men or women, Hispanic men or women, Asian-American men or women or white women,” says Harvard University sociology professor and diversity researcher Frank Dobbin. 

Yet despite its inadequacy, diversity and sensitivity training remains pervasive in workplaces. Often, it endures as a way to maintain optics, legal protection and the veneer of progressive action. But leading experts advocate for ditching these ineffective sessions, arguing instead for other initiatives that they believe can actually incite real change in a company...

“Part of why it's so popular, is it's a relatively low-cost initiative,” adds Calvin Lai, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St Louis, US. “You kind of get what you pay for: low cost, low pay off.” 

Additionally, when employees feel like they’re being controlled, says Dobbin, organisational studies show they tend to react negatively. So, when diversity training is designated as mandatory – which Dobbin’s research found was the case at 80% of corporations in the US – employees can perceive these sessions as much less palatable than if they were voluntary...

Training may also endure in an effort to legally protect companies. Research shows that in American civil rights cases against employers, judges often look more favourably at companies that have diversity training programmes and anti-discrimination manuals. “Because the courts are more sympathetic to just the existence of a diversity apparatus and they don’t really pay attention to the efficacy of that apparatus and whether or not it actually fosters change, companies do it as a way of protecting themselves,” says Newkirk. 

Theater.  There's so much we do anymore just to do it.