Diversity Courses Are Wasted Without Data to Track Workforce Composition: Opinion
The movement against unconscious bias training, once a key element of employers’ diversity and inclusion strategies, is growing. A controversial UK report into racial inequality has called for organizations to drop the courses entirely. It may actually be too soon to write them off, but investor pressure may help find something better.
Courses to tackle unconscious bias seek to address the problem that deep-seated, reflexive ways of thinking lead to discriminatory behavior. While there’s plenty of evidence that such ingrained prejudices exist, studies have struggled to establish whether these often one-off sessions make the slightest difference to what people actually do.