Do diversity initiatives work?

Over the last few years diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives have grown massively. Originally they were designed to ensure equality of opportunity for people of all social groups and characteristics, including in recruitment, development opportunities and promotion. These have been secured by extensive government legislation over the years. It is now illegal to discriminate against (or in favour of) someone on the basis of their race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc. This development has caused organisations to focus more specifically on merit, performance and potential when hiring, promoting and developing employees. Given that organisations are no longer screening out large swathes of the population, this provides a much bigger talent pool to work with.

Early D&I initiatives, including training programmes, were designed to ensure that such equal opportunity was facilitated (and also to prevent companies falling foul of the new legislation). Most people would agree that this has been a very positive development for both individuals and organisations.

In recent years the D&I training industry has grown massively. The content and focus of D&I training has also undergone a major shift in what is covered. This is to be expected given how well incentivised D&I training companies are in producing more of this material. In the US alone, D&I training is a $6 billion a year market. But is it good value for money? A major new study involving over 10,000 employees has indicated that such training is not very effective in bringing about behaviour change (see here for the details). In addition, much of the work done in both the US and the UK involves a psychometric assessment called the IAT (Implicit-Association Test). The IAT is intended to reveal a person’s unconscious bias towards people of other groups. Unfortunately this test also has come under criticism in recent times and is now considered to be unreliable and flawed.

D&I is becoming an increasingly complex area yet it does provide a good example of well-intended, expensive initiatives that can grow and grow with little evidence to support them. Hopefully these new studies will help to redesign D&I training to make it more effective.

We will be releasing further work on D&I initiatives later in the year. In the meantime if you would like further information on effective D&I coaching or selecting effective approaches, do get in touch.