A brief history of diversity training

Starbucks shut down every single one of its 8,000 U.S. stores last Tuesday to offer some 175,000 employees a short course in racial-bias training. This was prompted by the removal and arrest of two black men from one of the coffee giant’s Philadelphia stores.

While the spotlight shines on this current event, as well as other discriminatory practices that have spawned movements like #TimesUp, it’s hard to remember a time when diversity and inclusion wasn’t part of the vernacular of workplace issues.

As a concept, it’s relatively new. Here’s a brief timeline of what got us to the diversity and inclusion initiatives we have in the workplace today.

The legislative prompt

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that made discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin illegal for employers with more than 15 employees to discriminate in hiring, termination, promotion, compensation, job training, or any other term, condition, or privilege of employment.

Supplements to the law prohibit discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, age, and disability. Sexual harassment and discrimination based on sexual orientation are both also now illegal under Title VII.

A number of discrimination suits were filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If they or state agencies found “probable cause” for discrimination, one thing they’d often require was that the organization train all employees in anti-discriminatory behavior.

Companies take action

Leadership watching these filings and court-mandated training tried to be proactive to avoid expensive lawsuits and the potential for negative publicity that would accompany a ruling, so they took it on themselves to train managers and employees.

According to their paper on the history of diversity training by Rohini Anand and Mary-Frances Winters, most training at this time was “primarily the imparting of knowledge with recitations on the law and company policies, a litany of do’s and don’ts, and maybe a couple of case studies for the participants to ponder.” They say that those sessions varied from one hour to a full day, and it could often be a one-and-done event. “Many still require brief periodic refreshers of company policies and signatures from every employee to acknowledge that they had read and understood the policies and the consequences of noncompliance,” they add.

The Reagan era changes focus

After the initial period that saw a significant uptick in racial and gender diversity in the workplace, things stalled out in the early 1980s. This came alongside less focus on compliance at the hands of President Ronald Reagan’s deregulation policies, which contended that “intensive, fine-grained regulation of business led firms to opt out of compliance altogether. Goals, such as . . . reduced discrimination would be elusive under intense regulation.”

What’s more, Reagan appointed Clarence Thomas to lead the EEOC, and Thomas was not a fan of agreements that included goals and timetables for increasing representation of underrepresented groups, to allow employers to have more leeway. The result was less of a push to diversify, and training became a line item to reduce as part of cost-cutting efforts in an era when offshore competition heated up.

At this point, those companies that continued to push diversity training shifted their strategy, Winters and Anand write. They aimed to provide content that would help women and people of color assimilate into existing corporate cultures, Winters and Anand say, “based on the assumption that these new corporate entrants were less prepared because they had not yet developed the necessary managerial skills to be effective managers.”

Workforce 2000

In 1987, a book called Workforce 2000 came out, and among its predictions was that our future labor force would include more women and underrepresented minorities. As such, many experts use this publication as the impetus for creating and making a business case for the diversity training industry.

There is a simple test to help you spot the diversity programs that are going to eat up enormous quantities of time and effort. Surprisingly, perhaps, it is the same test you might use to identify the programs and policies that created your problem in the first place. The test consists of one question: Does this program, policy, or principle give special consideration to one group? Will it contribute to everyone’s success, or will it only produce an advantage for blacks or whites or women or men? Is it designed for them as opposed to us? Whenever the answer is yes, you’re not yet on the road to managing diversity.

Becoming culturally sensitive

After Roosevelt’s paradigm became more widely known in the 1990s, companies embarked on training that ranged from social justice to awareness and appreciation of differences, and even work-life balance, sexual orientation, age, and disabilities. Some were so “in your face,” Winters and Anand write, that there was a backlash from white men, which led to a historic Supreme Court case of Allan Bakke who alleged he was twice denied admission for medical school because of “reverse discrimination.” (He was granted admission, but the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action.)

It also led to including the controversial “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes” experiment in companies’ unconscious bias training. It was originally conceived by Jane Elliot, an Iowa public school teacher, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In it, students were grouped by the color of their eyes and told them that the blue-eyed group was superior and should get better treatment. The result was better performance from those with blue eyes.

Although this remains a powerful exercise, ultimately, they write, diversity training became a “‘check-off-the-box’ item evaluated not by its effectiveness, but rather by the number of people who were trained.”

Beyond 2000

Training continued to evolve in the new millennium. Anand and Winters write that contemporary approaches position diversity as a competency. “The assumption is no longer that only certain groups need training (e.g., white men or minorities), but rather that all employees need to be more cross-culturally competent in an increasingly global world,” they write. “It is just as important for an African-American male to learn more about his Chinese coworker or vice versa.”

Unfortunately, given the continued underrepresentation of women and minorities in most businesses as well as the continued harassment and discrimination of underrepresented groups, diversity training and inclusion initiatives still have a place in our corporate culture today.