Despite billions in backing, studies show diversity trainings just aren’t working

A wealth of research suggests that the billions of dollars corporate America, academia and government agencies have spent on diversity training have done little to impact people’s behavior.

What impact diversity trainings do have is often short-lived or purely influences beliefs without impacting actions, according to a review of multiple meta-analyses, a type of research that summarizes the results of hundreds of studies. American businesses alone spend roughly $8 billion a year on the same diversity trainings research suggests are ineffective, according to the Harvard Business Review.

On top of the billions corporations spend on diversity trainings, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of public funds flow to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives through state universities and the federal government.

A 2020 meta-analysis synthesized findings from 492 different studies and found that trainings designed to reduce implicit bias, a term used by academics to refer to discriminatory attitudes people hold but are not consciously aware of, “generally produced trivial changes in behavior.” Per the study, the trainings had “relatively weak” effects on measures of implicit bias, however, it also found that changes in implicit biases didn’t necessarily translate to behavioral changes.

Many nonprofits, like the National Equity Project, provide diversity training services to public and private clients like businesses.

“Nonprofit spending on the left, roughly defined, swamps the center-right by a factor of three or four to one depending on the year … and yet the country hasn’t really moved much,” Capital Research Center Senior Investigative Researcher Ken Braun told the Daily Caller News Foundation, speaking on diversity training spending. “The very fact that DEI was ever created demonstrates the abject failure of decades of spending and messaging on what we used to call ‘affirmative action.’”

Diversity trainings may influence the stated beliefs of participants, but cause little change in day-to-day behavior. A study conducted by a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers in 2019 surveyed 3,000 employees at a multi-national company and found that the impact of anti-sexism training led to employees acknowledging that women face discrimination, but not changing the way they behaved.

The apparent inefficacy of diversity training hasn’t stopped bureaucrats from spending public funds on it, with a number of school districts and public colleges paying Ibram X. Kendi, the academic famous for popularizing the idea of “anti-racism,” tens of thousands of dollars for presentations. Roughly two-thirds of American colleges in 2016 had diversity training for faculty, and 43% of those trainings were mandatory, according to a survey conducted by researchers Frank Dobbin of Harvard University and Alexandra Kalev of Tel-Aviv University.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order in June 2021 ordering federal agencies to increase their diversity programming, asserting that “such training programs should enable federal employees, managers and leaders to have knowledge of systemic and institutional racism and bias.”

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Questions surrounding the effectiveness of diversity trainings have existed for some time, with a 2009 analysis of hundreds of studies published in the Annual Review of Psychology failing to find evidence that diversity trainings are effective at reducing prejudice or influencing behavior in the ways intended.

Despite academics struggling to find evidence to support the efficacy of diversity trainings, many corporations leaned into such initiatives after the consulting firm McKinsey and Company published a report in 2015 claiming that companies with more diverse executives saw higher profits, according to the Wall Street Journal. Multiple academics, however, failed to replicate the results of the consulting firm’s study.

Repeating the studies of others is a common practice used in academia to determine if a result is reflective of reality or if it was the product of poor methodology or dumb luck. Econ Journal Watch (EJW), a publication run by economics professors, was among those that attempted to recreate McKinsey’s findings only to discover no statistically significant link between executive diversity and profitability.

“Caution is warranted in relying on McKinsey’s findings to support the view that US publicly traded firms can deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives,” EJW’s report reads. “We are unable to replicate the same statistically reliable association between firm financial performance and executive race/ethnic diversity as they report.”

A number of corporations are beginning to retreat from their diversity initiatives, with American Airlines, BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase and Lowe’s all editing their DEI policies to be less racially focused following lawsuit threats from conservatives.

Braun called the apparent movement of corporate America away from DEI initiatives “encouraging” but laughed when asked if academia and the federal government might follow suit.

Other studies have found that diversity trainings don’t only fail to alter people’s behavior but sometimes produce backlash effects that make people more prejudiced. Dobbin and Kalev, in a book they co-authored, found that after implementing diversity trainings, firms saw a decrease in women and minorities in leadership positions.

“If diversity training has no impact whatsoever, that would mean that perhaps billions of dollars are being wasted annually in the United States on these efforts,” journalist Jesse Singal wrote in 2023. “But there’s a darker possibility: Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the DEI climates of the organizations that pay for them.”

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