A new study from the Harvard Business Review found that diversity programs are actually counter-productive in that they make colleges less diverse.
The study, led by sociology Professors Frank Dobbin of Harvard and Alexandra Kalev of Tel Aviv University, examined three decades of data from more than 800 companies and measured the effectiveness of diversity programs based on the actual growth of minority populations in businesses over the course of five years.
It was discovered that companies that instituted required diversity training for managers, saw no increases in the proportion of Hispanics, African-American men, and white women in management. The percentage of African-American women and Asian Americans in management actually decreased by 9 percent and 4 percent, respectively.
The Review argued that employees don’t want to agree with a position that is presented to them in a mandatory training setting, and other studies agree with this line of thinking. Push diversity on workers, and they’re more averse to it. One study found diversity trainings anger employees and another study showed that people have more animosity toward minority groups after taking mandatory diversity training.
“Laboratory studies show that this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out. As social scientists have found, people often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy. Try to coerce me to do X, Y, or Z, and I’ll do the opposite just to prove that I’m my own person,” Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev wrote for the Review.
Another reason why the Review believes diversity trainings are ineffective is because three-fourths of trainings are administered using “negative messages,” with instructors emphasizing the legal consequences of discrimination and telling horror stories of crushing settlements. Presenting “threats,” however, doesn’t win over employees.
Many grievance procedures, such as bias reporting systems, have similar adverse effects. The Review found that retaliation often follows formal discrimination reports. In fact, formal grievance procedures actually reduced the percentage of minority employees at a business over a five-year period.
“Among the nearly 90,000 discrimination complaints made to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2015, 45 percent included a charge of retaliation—which suggests that the original report was met with ridicule, demotion, or worse,” Dobbin and Kalev wrote.
Despite many studies finding that those programs have been ineffective, colleges and universities continue to pump money into them.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison spent $200,000 on creating a diversity training program for all incoming students, according to Campus Reform. Ultimately, taxpayer dollars that fund public universities are funding diversity programs that cause people to resent minority groups.
“Strategies for controlling bias — which drive most diversity efforts — have failed spectacularly since they were introduced to promote equal opportunity,” Dobbin and Kalev wrote.
“It isn’t that there aren’t enough educated women and minorities out there — both groups have made huge educational gains over the past two generations. The problem is that we can’t motivate people by forcing them to get with the program and punishing them if they don’t,” Dobbin and Kalev wrote. “The numbers sum it up. Your organization will become less diverse, not more, if you require managers to go to diversity training, try to regulate their hiring and promotion decisions, and put in a legalistic grievance system.”
The programs that work have been voluntary. Voluntary diversity training has shown increases of 9 percent to 13 percent in black men, Hispanic men, and Asian-American men and women in management five years out. Voluntary diversity training has also shown no decreases of any minority groups in the workforce.
Research done at the University of Toronto also finds this to be true. Their study had white people read a brochure critiquing prejudice toward blacks. When people felt pressured to agree with the reading, their bias against black people increased. When people felt the choice was theirs, the reading reduced their bias against black people.
Hopefully, universities and businesses will stop wasting their money on ineffective diversity training methods and instead invest that money into things that will actually benefit their business or college community.
