uncommon sense in offering training to faculty and students, and even mandate it (29% of all schools require faculty to undergo training), is par- Why Doesn’t Diversity ticularly surprising given that the research on Training Work? the poor performance of training comes out of academia. Imagine university health cen- The Challenge for Industry ters continuing to prescribe vitamin C for the common cold. and Academia Corporate antibias training was stimu- lated by the civil rights movement of the Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev 1950s and 1960s and legal reforms that movement brought about. Federal agen- cies took the lead, and by the end of 1971, tarbucks’ decision to put 175,000 work- the Social Security Administration had put Sers through diversity training on May 29, 50,000 staffers through racial bias training. in the wake of the widely publicized arrest By 1976, 60 percent of big companies of- of two black men in a Philadelphia store, fered equal-opportunity training. In the put diversity training back in the news. But 1980s, as Reagan tried to tear down affir- corporations and universities have been do- mative action regulations and appointed ing diversity training for decades. Nearly Clarence Thomas to run the Equal Employ- all Fortune 500 companies do training, and ment Opportunity Commission, trainers be- two-thirds of colleges and universities have gan to make a business case for what they training for faculty according to our 2016 called “diversity training.” They argued that survey of 670 schools. Most also put fresh- women and minorities would soon be the men through some sort of diversity session backbone of the workforce and that em- as part of orientation. Yet hundreds of studies ployers needed to figure out how to better dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias incorporate them. By 2005, 65 percent of training does not reduce bias, alter behavior large firms offered diversity training. Con- or change the workplace. sultants have heralded training as essential We have been speaking to employers for increasing diversity, corporate counsel about this research for more than a decade, have advised that it is vital for fending off with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effec- tive, diversity program around. But they per- sist, worried about the optics of getting rid of Yet hundreds of studies dating back training, concerned about litigation, unwill- to the 1930s suggest that anti-bias ing to take more difficult but consequential training doesn’t reduce bias, alter steps or simply in the thrall of glossy training materials and their purveyors. That colleges behavior, or change the workplace. and universities in the United States persist 48 anthropology Volume 10 • Number 2 • September 2018 Anthropology Now, 10:48–55, 2018 • Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1942-8200 print / 1949-2901 online • https://doi.org/10.1080/19428200.2018.1493182 lawsuits and plaintiffs have asked for it in Most of these studies look at interven- most discrimination settlements.1 tions that mirror corporate and university Yet two-thirds of human resources spe- training in intensity and duration. One im- cialists report that diversity training does not portant study by Patricia Devine and col- have positive effects, and several field studies leagues suggests that a more extensive cur- have found no effect of diversity training on riculum, based in strategies proven effective women’s or minorities’ careers or on mana- in the lab, can reduce measured bias.5 That gerial diversity.2 These findings are not sur- 12-week intervention, which took the form prising. There is ample evidence that training of a college course and included a control alone does not change attitudes or behavior, group, worked best for people who were or not by much and not for long. In their re- concerned about discrimination and who view of 985 studies of antibias interventions, did the exercises — best when preaching Paluck and Green found little evidence that to the converted. We do not see employers training reduces bias. In their review of 31 jumping on this costly bandwagon. Con- organizational studies using pretest/posttest sider Starbucks, which closed 8,000 stores assessments or a control group, Kulik and for half a day to train 175,000 workers, at Roberson identified 27 that documented im- an estimated cost of $12 million in lost busi- proved knowledge of, or attitudes toward, ness alone. Starbucks hires 100,000 new diversity, but most found small, short-term workers each year, and to match the Devine improvements on one or two of the items intervention they would need a dozen half- measured. In their review of 39 similar stud- day sessions, every year, for more than half ies, Bezrukova, Joshi and Jehn identified only the workforce. Unlikely they would go that five that examined long-term effects on bias, far, even if the logistics of scaling a class- two showing positive effects, two negative, room intervention to 100,000 people could and one no effect.3 be worked out. A number of recent studies of antibias Despite the poor showing of antibias train- training used the implicit association test ing in academic studies, it remains the go-to (IAT) before and after to assess whether un- solution for corporate executives and univer- conscious bias can be affected by training. sity administrators facing public relations cri- A meta-analysis of 426 studies found weak ses, campus intolerance and slow progress on immediate effects on unconscious bias and diversifying the executive and faculty ranks. weaker effects on explicit bias. A side-by- Why is diversity training not more effective? side test of 17 interventions to reduce white If we can answer that question, perhaps we bias toward blacks found that eight reduced can fix it. Five different lines of research sug- unconscious bias, but in a follow-up exam- gest why it may fail. ining eight implicit bias interventions and First, short-term educational interventions one sham, all nine worked, suggesting that in general do not change people. This should subjects may have learned how to game come as no surprise to anthropologists. De- the bias test.4 Effects dissipated within a cades of research on workplace training of all few days. sorts suggests that by itself, training does not Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev The Trouble with Diversity Training 49 do much. Take workplace safety and health found the message of multiculturalism, training which, it stands to reason, employ- which is common in training, makes whites ees have an interest in paying attention to. feel excluded and reduces their support for Alone, it does little to change attitudes or be- diversity, relative to the message of color- havior. If you cannot train workers to attach blindness, which is rare these days. Whites the straps on their hard hats, it may be well- generally feel they will not be treated fairly nigh impossible to get them to give up biases in workplaces with prodiversity messages.10 that they have acquired over a lifetime of me- Perhaps this is why trainers frequently report dia exposure and real-world experience. hostility and resistance, and trainees often Second, some have argued that antib- leave “confused, angry, or with more ani- ias training activates stereotypes. Field and mosity toward” other groups.11 The trouble is, laboratory studies find that asking people to when African-Americans work with whites suppress stereotypes tends to reinforce them who take a color-blind stance (rather than a — making them more cognitively accessible multicultural stance), it alienates them, re- to people.6 Try not thinking about elephants. ducing their psychological engagement at Diversity training typically encourages peo- work and quite possibly reducing their likeli- ple to recognize and fight the stereotypes hood of staying on.12 So perhaps trainers can- they hold, and this may simply be counter- not win with a message of either multicultur- productive. alism or color-blindness. Third, recent research suggests that train- Fifth, we know from a large body of or- ing inspires unrealistic confidence in anti- ganizational research that people react discrimination programs, making employees negatively to efforts to control them. Job- complacent about their own biases. In the autonomy research finds that people resist lab, Castilla and Benard found that when external controls on their thoughts and be- experimenters described subjects’ employ- havior and perform poorly in their jobs when ers as nondiscriminatory, subjects did not they lack autonomy. Self-determination re- censor their own gender biases.7 Employees search shows that when organizations frame who go through diversity training may not, motivation for pursuing a goal as originating subsequently, take responsibility for avoid- internally, commitment rises, but when they ing discrimination. Kaiser and colleagues frame motivation as originating externally, re- found that when subjects are told that their bellion increases. Legault, Gutsell and Inzli- employers have prodiversity measures such cht found this to be true in the case of anti- as training, they presume that the workplace bias training. Kidder and colleagues showed is free of bias and react harshly to claims of that when diversity programs are introduced discrimination.8 More generally, in experi- with an external rationale — avoiding law- ments, the presence of workplace diversity suit — participants were more resistant than programs seems to blind employees to hard