Retooling Career Systems to Fight Workplace Bias: Evidence from U.S. Corporations

Those trainings signal in myriad ways that the threat of lawsuit is the reason for training: sessions are run by compliance departments that mandate attendance, highlight the risk of litigation, and test trainees on the law. [...] What can these rich data tell us about the effects on managerial diversity of training programs and programs that increase intergroup contact? In our research on diversity training, we test the proposition that the most common form of diversity training–legalistic training for managers–back- fires, leading to decreases in the diversity of managers. [...] They walk out with an engagement action plan–what am I going to do differently in my job? I am going to interact with team members [differently], and I know how to see things differently.” The point of cultural-inclusion training is to teach managers to listen to peo- ple from different backgrounds, so as to understand their challenges, and to ob- serve interactions of their workers, so as to unde. [...] These teams have the added benefit of forging intergroup contact between white people and men, concentrated in certain departments and roles, and people of color and women, concentrated in other departments and roles. [...] Academics have developed training 224 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Alexandra Kalev & Frank Dobbin protocols based in the science, yet meta-analyses of their own scientific studies are clear: this sort of training does not reliably reduce implicit bias in the long term or discrimination in the short term.