A study reported by Fortune and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences set out to determine if diversity training currently being conducted by companies to improve attitudes toward women and racial minorities actually works.
Results suggest that “the one-off diversity trainings that are commonplace in organizations are not panaceas for remedying bias in the workplace.”
According to the article in Fortune, researchers found that “participants who were already most likely to support underrepresented groups in the workplace developed further changes in behavior from the training”…but “participants who started out without much consideration for diversity didn’t change their behavior at all.”
The bottom line? Diversity training alone is not enough to reach the people who most need to change their behavior.