Progressive groupthink has thoroughly infected the establishment media. But once in a while, something insightful does still sneak through the gatekeepers and shine light on the dogma of the day. The latest such revelation comes courtesy of the Washington Post, which surprisingly just published an expert analysis explaining that the “diversity training” movement is bunk.
For context, after the tragic police killing of George Floyd in 2020, corporations fully embraced diversity training, turning it into a multi-billion-dollar industry. Princeton psychology professor Betsy Levy Paluck writes in a new Post op-ed, “Chief diversity officer hires tripled among the largest publicly traded companies, enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion offerings for which U.S. companies paid an estimated $3.4 billion to outside firms that year.”
When it comes to diversity programming, "we don’t have good evidence for what works," @betsylevyp writes in a guest opinion. "We’re treating a pandemic of discrimination and racial and religious resentment with untested drugs." https://t.co/xNBNu8uxEU
— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) December 13, 2022
But, while this may have made for good PR, companies were rushing to invest in diversity training with little research backing it up.
“Among people who believe in the basic mission, common questions about diversity training have shifted from ‘Which training is best?’ to ‘Is the training even a good idea?’ and ‘Does the training have negative effects?’” the author, who is very sympathetic to the idea behind the training, explains.
She goes on to explain that there are very few quality studies examining the impact of this kind of training, and cites some evidence of instances where it may even be counterproductive.
For example, “implicit bias” training, which focuses on our alleged unconscious biases, is based on a popular Harvard test. There’s just one problem: the test is complete junk science because many people get different results every single time they take it. Yet, its nonetheless commonly used in Corporate America, higher education, and elsewhere. But research has since shown that this “implicit bias training is worse than useless. It, in the words of that conservative rag Vice, can even “antagonize the workers it’s supposed to help.”
With such conflicting and sparse evidence, Paluck concludes that “We’re treating a pandemic of discrimination and racial and religious resentment with untested drugs.”
Suffice it to say that corporations and government agencies shouldn’t be spending billions on training that’s so divisive and unsubstantiated even liberal media outlets are admitting it.
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