DEBUNKING DEI MYTHS Despite decades of diversity training, real workplace fairness remains elusive. Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi explain how
to truly level the playing field, we must understand why current approaches fall short, paving the way for evidence‑based solutions that create lasting change C orporate diversity training has existed since the 1960s, when it was born out of the civil rights movement in the United States, while training to ‘de-bias’ our minds has exploded in popularity over the last decade. However, it appears we have invested in short-term programmatic solutions instead of addressing unfair organisational processes that govern how we work every day. We have siloed fairness instead of involving everyone in embedding this concept. If we are serious about levelling the playing field and giving everyone a chance to succeed instead of keeping some people out, merely raising awareness won’t do. Training alone won’t cut it either. Nor will the many one-off efforts that companies have focused on. Why? Because making work fair is not a programme, but a way of doing things. For better results, we need to understand what is going wrong and why our efforts – often based on best practices rather than the best evidence – have not moved the needle enough. We need to debunk common myths about fairness to clear the way for more effective solutions. Myth 1: We need to de-bias individuals If you think that eliminating bias from human brains is necessary to create fairer workplaces, you are not alone. Unfortunately, that approach is hardly feasible because unconscious bias at an individual level is extremely difficult to change. At best, some programmatic interventions have managed to temporarily affect people’s attitudes and/or their awareness of bias. But there is little indication that any change in unconscious bias awareness has led to sustainable changes in behaviour. Simply put, de-biasing humans is incredibly hard and might well be impossible. What we can do is de-bias the organisational processes, environments and policies that we have created and that contain built-in bias. People’s actions change when the systems surrounding them change – even if their unconscious or conscious biases do not. Not to mention that a single process or policy is much easier to tackle than dozens, hundreds, or thousands of individual minds.
By designing smart systems, we can help ourselves live up to our best intentions and perform even better than we could if left to our own devices. While it would be wonderful to get everyone to change their hearts and minds and shed their biases, the evidence simply doesn’t suggest that this is a realistic aspiration. Fortunately, we do not need to de-bias ourselves or others to design workplaces that are less biased and more fair. Myth 2: We can train our way to fairness The evidence indicates that diversity training generally does not work to change behaviours or improve measurable outcomes. An analysis of more than 40 years’ worth of personnel and administrative data from more than 800 US companies showed that providing diversity training to all employees was not correlated with the likelihood that women or people of colour would become managers. In fact, in the case of Latina staff, their chances of making it into management actually reduced when training was offered. Providing diversity training with legal content – which was the case in three-quarters of all training programmes – was associated in management terms with a decrease in the share of white women, Black women and men, as well as Asian American women and men. We should also be careful with training because it can be harmful to the end goal of making real progress on fairness. Besides backlash from some groups – such as unconscious and conscious bias increasing when people feel pressured to exhibit less of it or feel ‘morally licensed’ to compensate for their good training efforts – one of the dangers of diversity training is the window-dressing effect, whereby the mere existence of training leads people to believe that problems have been solved. In a set of experiments, organisations that offered training to promote diversity were perceived to be fairer to underrepresented groups (in this case, women and people of colour). This led majority group members (in this case, men and white people) to become less sensitive to discrimination in hiring, promotions and compensation decisions.
36 Ambition • ISSUE 3 • 2025
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online