What If Diversity Trainings Are Doing More Harm Than Good?

Any broad statements gloss over some nuance, but having been through many of these trainings over the years I’d have to agree with the concerns these articles raise. Blunders like the controversy around promoting “LatinX” as a term and calling people “not inclusive” for saying “Latino” also highlight cases where these programs can actually end up being quite offensive to the very people they claim to be “helping.”

That’s all compounded by the fact that DEI leaders often (perhaps unintentionally) create a rather non-inclusive company environments where people with legitimate concerns are terrified of raising concerns about the equity of efforts for fear of retaliation, being labeled various nasty things, and so on.

Diversity is extremely important in organizations, but these DEI efforts need some serious inflection and acknowledgment of the harm they may have caused towards the end they claim to be serving.

then do them better.

It's pretty common for the first iteration of something to be terrible.

Early surgery killed most of its patients. Think of current DEI as basically 18th-century medicine.

The correct response, as with surgery, is not to abandon the work, but rather do it in a way that yields better results.

One thing I saw at a large tech corporation that was very DEI-focused (circa 2020) was that several of the interventions primarily addressed the need to feel that something could be done at all, which is a fascinating psychological need, fundamental to normally-functioning humans, and almost always overlooked.

During 2020, this was important both to the employer, which wanted to be seen as though they were on the correct side of history, and diverse hires (like me,) who wanted to have a feeling like management was not abandoning or ignoring us during a fraught period.

What happened, though, was that we were sort of encouraged to really take up a lot of space. While this may have helped the progressive movement (an outcome I am incidentally fine with,) it wound up doing so at the expense of several careers (an outcome I am not fine with.)

This reminds me of the early days of what was then called the 'gay lib' movement, as captured in e.g. the film _Milk_. Group pressure to come out, and show your support for your people, often ignored the (often extremely serious) consequences gay men experienced when they did what their community asked.

That the strategy *worked* for the gay mens' community does not mean it was without ethical blemish, and a similar moral hazard is not something I want from my HR department.

The balance that a marginalized person must seek between personal advancement and communal advancement is irreducibly and overwhelmingly personal, intimate, and, in a workplace, where you are *trying to do work*, probably not a great thing for HR to dig into, unless it wants to start offering career insurance to people who are coaxed into expressing something private, in the wrong room, to the wrong audience, and are never seen the same way again.

As a trans woman, Singal is one of my least-favourite writers, so I am at pains to express my disagreement with him on any point other than this: current DEI efforts are naive and often have perverse effects.

The solution I'd propose is: in HR, hire anthropologists, not activists. Get people who spend as much time observing and attempting to understand without judgment as they spend making slide decks about Bringing Your Whole Self to Work, and other terrible ideas. At least some of DEI's goals are achievable. But we can't get there from here.