By Jacob Mansfield, Y13
Here at the International School of Geneva, diversity and inclusion have long been the bread and butter of countless newsletters, surveys, and speeches. Yet worldwide, social justice movements in the wake of the George Floyd protests last June have led to a rise in so-called “diversity training” within academic and professional settings. Dr.Hughes has started similar initiatives here at Ecolint, first with sessions last summer with the faculty in which concepts such as anti-racism were discussed, and now with the academically focused “Decolonising the curriculum” series sitting in your inboxes. These may seem like commendable movements, but what does science say about the effectiveness of such efforts in reducing bias and highlighting injustice?
An experiment designed by the Harvard business review concluded that employees who had gone through diversity training were, although more likely to acknowledge prejudice, not necessarily more prone to changing their behavior. However, interestingly, simply recognizing biases against certain minorities made it more likely for bias against other unrelated minorities to decrease. Diversity training also made it more likely for women to be proactive in their careers. Meta-analysis of other psychological studies highlight the positive, albeit weak effect diversity training has on reducing implicit biases. However, this analysis continues to describe how effects on behavior are negligible.
The way diversity training is administered, counterintuitively, can also have adverse effects on reducing bias. Mandatory sessions can foster hostility in those undergoing them and lead to diminishing returns – participants may even act with greater prejudice later. Yet voluntary programs were much more effective and resulted in significant increases in the representation of minorities in management positions.
To summarize, diversity training and related initiatives are somewhat performative: although neuroscience tells us that subconscious currents such as bias can be modified with time, and diversity training precipitates such change, it often has little effect on improving behavior, especially when it feels imposed. On the flip side, resources such as “decolonising the curriculum” do no harm, shining light on subjects neglected by Western canon and existing power structures. Acknowledging problems is, after all, the first step towards solving them.
