In 2018, two black men were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks after asking to use the bathroom without placing an order. The incident of racial bias made headlines nationwide, prompting Starbucks to close all its stores for an afternoon so employees could take an anti-bias training course. That decision prompted the question: Does diversity training work? New research from Wharton aims to provide answers.
A paper by titled “The Mixed Effects of Online Diversity Training,” published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, allowed researchers access to over 3,000 employees for the purposes of the study. Edward Chang, a doctoral candidate in the decision processes group at Wharton and co-author Katherine Milkman, a Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions indicate early in the paper that that there hasn’t been a lot of research on the effectiveness of these types of diversity programs. (Penn’s Adam Grant and Angela Duckworth also contributed to the paper.)
Milkman explains, “It is actually really hard work to do. There is a large body of research that looks at the effectiveness of diversity training—it just has never been done the way we were able to do it, which is a large-scale study in a real organization, as opposed to an educational setting. And we measured actual behaviors, rather than just how people say they feel or what they say their attitudes are right after completing it.” Chang adds, “One of the big innovations in our study is that we did a field experiment. We randomized people into taking either diversity training or placebo training (which was training about a topic that was unrelated to bias or stereotyping or diversity). This is really important because it helps us disentangle whether effects of diversity training are due to people being willing to volunteer for diversity training, or just taking any training at all. We can really see what is the effect of doing diversity training, specifically.”
Read more at Knowledge@Wharton.
