
Shoshana Davidson
Principal Advisor
The corporate buzzwords of the moment: unconscious bias and diversity training. These training programmes have been introduced to organisations across the world over decades, with high hopes that they will make workplaces more inclusive. In the US alone, companies spend $8billion a year on diversity training. But do they work?
This is a question we ask attendees at our ‘What works for diversity and inclusion?’ workshops regularly. Between about 11% and 50% of attendees at recent workshops think that unconscious bias training (UBT) decreases bias and discrimination in the workplace. However, the evidence base tells a different, murkier story.
Studies are yet to rigorously show that UBT and diversity training change biased behaviours in the workplace in any lasting way, or improve outcomes for women and Black and ethnic minority groups in terms of representation in leadership positions or reducing pay gaps.
Today in the government has published a written ministerial statement putting the record straight. Here’s the evidence behind it.
Unconscious biases influence our judgement without us being aware of them. Unconscious bias training in the workplace aims to make people aware of potentially harmful unconscious biases and to reduce the impact of those biases on their interaction with others.
Some types of UBT may have limited positive effects such as creating awareness and shifting people’s attitudes in the short-term. Measures of awareness change are generally based on self-reported measures, however, which themselves may not be reliable.
In any case, awareness alone is not enough to make change happen, and there is no conclusive evidence that this training changes attitudes in any lasting way – with some studies finding that UBT does not change the gender stereotypes people endorse (such as agreeing to the statement ‘women are worse at maths than men’).
Evidence that this training changes behaviour or improves workplace equality remains elusive. This is compounded by few studies using valid measures of behaviour change in their design.
More worryingly, some studies have even identified potential back-firing effects when UBT participants are exposed to information that suggests stereotypes and biases are omnipresent and unchangeable, or when they react against mandatory training.
Diversity training is designed to raise awareness of diversity issues in the workplace and to promote positive interactions between members of different groups. As with UBT it can help raise awareness but is unlikely to change behaviour.
Diversity training packages come in a wide range of formats and there is no standardisation of content. However a review of corporate diversity training from 1964-2008 found that:
In general, short-term educational interventions do not change people – especially where people have acquired biases over a lifetime of media exposure and repeated messages from their social environment. A few other hypotheses have been made as to why these training session fall short:
We therefore do not recommend prioritising the use of resources on unconscious bias or diversity training over alternative interventions which have a more promising evidence base
While there is limited evidence, some ideas about how to improve training include
In the absence of good evidence for the effectiveness of UBT and diversity training, we encourage organisations to:
Principal Advisor
Principal Advisor
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