Starbucks is trying. In 2018 the coffeehouse company became a national punching bag after a café manager called the police on two Black men for sitting and not ordering anything in one of its Philadelphia locations. Ever since, company leaders have been working, fully caffeinated, to make amends for this racist misstep. Right after the incident, they closed some 8,000 shops for a day to hold a mandatory antibias training. Then, they worked with scholars at Arizona State University for a year and a half to develop “To Be Welcoming,” an online curriculum featuring videos of leading scholars on topics ranging from policing in America to harmful stereotypes about people with disabilities. The company released To Be Welcoming as a voluntary class for their employees last September. At the same time, they made the class freely available to anybody who’d like to use it.
The team designed the course to encourage discussion among employees about how to improve the workplace, says Bryan Brayboy, a professor of indigenous education and justice at ASU, who led the curriculum design. He calls To Be Welcoming an “invitation” for people to gather, listen, and plan for change. “We really see the curriculum as the commencement of things, not the end,” he says.
According to Zulima Espinel, the vice president of global public policy at Starbucks, over 33,000 people within the company and in the general public have signed up to take Starbucks’ curriculum. One goal is to provide employees with “common terminology to encourage conversations” about racism in the workplace, says Espinel.
In creating this series, Starbucks has essentially updated a decades-long workplace tradition: the diversity training workshop. The formats vary, with consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, for example, now offering diversity training in virtual reality. But generally, training consists of company employees sitting down to a presentation from a coworker or outside contractor to educate them about their prejudices, with the goal of creating a more diverse workplace. The workshops might involve instruction on racist terminology to avoid, group discussion about how to handle discriminatory situations, or lectures about a company’s code of conduct.
For years, these workshops have been one of the private sector’s most popular tools to introduce variation into their employee pool. A 2016 Harvard Business Review analysis found that nearly all Fortune 500 companies and nearly half of midsize companies employ diversity training. Many workplaces outsource this training, which has led to the formation of entire companies dedicated to running diversity workshops, forming the basis of a now multibillion-dollar diversity industry, writes journalist Pamela Newkirk in her 2019 book, Diversity, Inc. “I think of it as the equity-diversity-inclusion industrial complex,” says physicist Brian Nord of the Department of Energy laboratory Fermilab. As one of the few Black men in his field, Nord has participated in many diversity-centered activities and led some of his own discussions.
The industry exists for this moment. This summer, the weeks of massive protests that followed the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers have prompted a soul-searching national conversation about race and diversity. As both real-world and virtual protesters call for social change, many corporate executives, government officials, and other institutional leaders are again turning to diversity training as a solution to inequity in the workplace.
So now seems like a good time to raise a scientific question: Does the training actually work?
A lot of research suggests not. Sociology studies by researchers at Harvard University, Tel Aviv University, and the University of Minnesota in 2007 and 2016 that examined more than 800 companies over three decades found that firms that used diversity training did not hire significantly more diverse managers, and that the trainings actually correlated with a decrease in Black female managers. Workforce statistics support this conclusion: Between 1985 and 2016, the percentage of Black men in management at US companies with at least 100 employees has increased from 3 percent to a still paltry 3.2 percent, according to Diversity, Inc. Only two Black women—Xerox’s Ursula Burns and Bed Bath and Beyond’s Mary Winston—have ever been the CEO of a Fortune 500 company since 1955, the year the magazine began compiling that annual list, and they have since stepped down from those roles.
So diversity training doesn’t have a great track record of boosting Black employees into the executive suite. “I would advise companies to spend the money on something else,” says sociologist Frank Dobbin of Harvard University, who worked on the 2007 and 2016 studies. As an alternative to diversity training, he suggests companies try special recruitment programs, such as soliciting new hires from historically black colleges and universities. “The effects are lasting, because they’re actually bringing more kinds of people in,” he says.
Diversity training may actually cause a backlash in its participants, particularly if people feel forced to attend. “If I tell you, ‘Don’t think of an elephant,’ you’ll be thinking about elephants,” says Dobbin. “If you tell people to think about their biases, their biases may be activated.”
For example, a 2015 study by psychologists from the University of Washington and UC Santa Barbara found that in simulated job interviews with 77 white men, participants experienced increased cardiovascular stress after reading a pro-diversity message. (The experiment did not include people from other demographics.) In an additional study that included people of other gender and racial backgrounds, the researchers found that white men were also more likely to believe they were being treated unfairly. “Importantly, diversity messages led to these effects regardless of these men’s political ideology, attitudes toward minority groups, beliefs about the prevalence of discrimination against whites, or beliefs about the fairness of the world,” the authors wrote in a summary of their study for Harvard Business Review. These responses, they continue, “exist even among those who endorse the tenets of diversity and inclusion.”
Diversity training may also do more for the company than for the workers. UC Berkeley law professor Lauren Edelman has found that in discrimination lawsuits, judges evaluate a company’s compliance with anti-discrimination laws based on the mere presence of diversity policies, rather than their effectiveness. Ultimately, a company may find that spending money on diversity training is cheaper than a lawsuit, and so the purpose of the workshop becomes symbolic, argues Newkirk, a professor of journalism at New York University. Training may be ineffective, too, because people now use the word diversity to refer to an abstract debate about fairness, rather than to undo specific historical inequities. “The term has been broadened to the point where it’s become meaningless,” says Newkirk.
Nord, for example, has participated in diversity seminars that barely discuss racism, if at all. Some workshop leaders, he says, will cast differences in education backgrounds and job experience as “diversity.” “People play a game with [the definition] so that they don’t have to actually focus on justice, accountability, or change,” says Nord. Often, he finds the workshops focus on the needs of white women, while ignoring other underrepresented groups. “In most of my experience, these seminars have been bad,” says Nord.
“Diversity” wasn’t always meaningless. When diversity initiatives began with President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the 1960s, policymakers specified concrete objectives such as the integration of schools and the reduction of poverty. The definition of diversity began to broaden, some legal experts say, with the 1978 Supreme Court case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.
In that case, a white man named Allan Bakke argued that his rejection from the UC Davis School of Medicine, which capped the number of white students admitted, stemmed from reverse discrimination. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled in favor of Bakke’s admission to the school and deemed racial quotas unconstitutional. “The notion of reverse discrimination, that if you try to address this legacy of bigotry that you are hurting whites, has been an ongoing theme since the Bakke decision,” says Newkirk. In 2016, in Fisher v. University of Texas, a white woman, Abigail Fisher, argued a similar case before the Supreme Court regarding a college rejection. (The court ruled against her in favor of the university’s diversity admission policy in a 4-3 decision.)
Given its toothlessness, why is diversity training still so popular? “It’s easy,” says Newkirk. “It’s one day or one week of training, and you go on as if, ‘OK, now we’ve settled that problem.’” Quoting civil rights lawyer Cyrus Mehri, Newkirk calls these trainings “drive-by diversity.” Fostering a supportive workplace for Black people and other minorities requires far more commitment, she says.
Some institutions have made fledgling efforts to tether “diversity” goals once again to concrete outcomes. In June, Nord helped lead a worldwide one-day strike called #ShutDownSTEM and #Strike4BlackLives, as more than 5,000 scientists paused their usual work to develop plans to end anti-Black racism in their overwhelmingly white workplaces. (81 percent of full-time professors in the US are non-Hispanic whites, while the demographic makes up only 60 percent of the US population, according to the US Census Bureau.) On their website, organizers of the scientific strike specifically asked participants to avoid more “diversity and inclusion talks and seminars.”
Instead, some participants discussed hiring and recruitment. Staff at the scientific journal Nature participated in the strike, and now the journal’s leadership, which has no Black editors, is “examining our own hiring practices,” editor-in-chief Magdalena Skipper wrote WIRED in an email. At the online preprint repository, arXiv, one of physicists’ most popular forums, staff also participated in the strike. They discussed the requirements and recruitment strategies for their scientific advisory board and set a potential goal of “ensuring that arXiv has a presence at minority professional conferences,” arXiv spokesperson Alison Fromme wrote to WIRED.
Still, some experts think that diversity training—when done thoughtfully—may offer some benefits. Erin-Kate Escobar, a diversity and inclusion expert at Caltech, and one of the organizers of #ShutDownSTEM, thinks that workshops can be effective if they are tailored to be relevant to a particular group of attendees. They also need to be more than a one-off event, she says. “You want it to be something that is ongoing,” says Escobar. “You don’t want it to be that if someone misses that day, they miss that information.”
In addition, while workshops don’t necessarily inspire people to change their behavior, studies show that participants do learn about racism, says psychologist Eden King of Rice University. “They become more aware, more knowledgeable,” she says. King thinks that diversity training can be useful in combination with hiring and recruitment programs.
A 2019 University of Pennsylvania study of over 10,000 employees at an unnamed global organization found that while training doesn’t make leadership more likely to offer mentorship to employees of underrepresented groups, it does make women in junior positions more likely to seek mentorship from leadership. “Interestingly, one of the strongest behavioral effects we detect is that our training prompted women to connect with more senior women,” the authors write. They also find that the “training may have signaled to women that they needed to be more proactive about their advancement in the company.” They also found that the training didn’t produce a backlash, although they attributed this to attendance being voluntary and the participants already holding fairly progressive views on gender issues. The study’s authors also recommend that workshop leaders treat their sessions more like scientific experiments—that they collect data on participant behavior and attitudes, and revise the curriculum accordingly.
Innovations on the format may also prove more effective. Felicia Moore Mensah, a professor of science education at Columbia University, teaches an elective semester-long course designed to help future K-12 teachers better support students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Mensah avoids lecturing and has tried to curate a personal, introspective diversity training. The students read texts, watch videos, and write in journals to reflect on their understanding of race, which they share only with her. “The confrontations become more internal, as people try to figure out what biases they have,” she says. On the first day, she asks them to explain the reasons they are taking the course, what she refers to as their “whys.” “They have to answer those questions for themselves,” says Mensah. “They may not be able to answer in that moment, but as we continue through the course, I’m hoping it becomes more clear to them.”
When designing the Starbucks’ curriculum, Brayboy’s team kept the research about potential backlash in mind. “Tonality is really important to us,” he says. “We had a series of internal reviews with a group of faculty members who have ideologies which may run counter to the material itself, and asked, ‘Did we get the tone right? Are there words in here that may turn you away? What do we need to do it differently?’” They wanted to make sure the coursework did not feel confrontational to people who might not normally participate in a conversation about race, he says.
By making To Be Welcoming public, the team also opened their diversity initiative to external criticism, which is not common among private companies. “Usually, you can’t even see what people get during the trainings, because the trainers don’t want you to copy what they’re doing,” says Dobbin. “It’s interesting that Starbucks just put this out there.” This way, independent researchers can more easily evaluate whether the program is effective, he says.
Starbucks’ team is treating the course as just one piece of their new diversity initiative. “It has to come with a lot of other systemic work,” says Espinel. Company leaders, for example, have set a goal that people of color will comprise 30 percent of all corporate positions by 2025. They have also opened themselves up to external audits of their workplace practices, which they’ve made public. As companies and institutions take a new look at the persistent systemic racism in their ranks, the role of the diversity workshop, too, must evolve.
Update 7-14-2020 10:08 am EST: This story was updated to correct the month when To Be Welcoming became available to the public.
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