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Time Magazine had a story on April 26, 2007, entitled “Employee Diversity Training Doesn’t Work.”

If even Time Magazine, which loves the concept of cultural diversity, doesn’t see any value in diversity “training,” that is a strong sign that such training must really be useless.

Thanks for the link to my OpenMarket blog post, which also discusses how employers have repeatedly been sued as a result of diversity training

Diversity training often triggers racial and sexual conflicts and tensions among employees, by forcing them to discuss divisive racial and sexual issues. Sometimes, it exposes attitudes by managers that are later relied on or taken out of context by trial lawyers in order to sue the employer for discrimination. And occasionally, the diversity training goes so badly awry that the training itself is deemed sexual or racial harassment, as happened in Hartman v. Pena (1995), where a white male employee managed to sue the FAA for sexual harassment based on its anti-male diversity training.

Diversity training is an unwarranted litigation risk and injurious to employee morale.

I’ve practiced civil rights law, worked for a civil rights agency, and read thousands of court rulings in discrimination cases, and have never seen any evidence that holding diversity training is in any way helpful to employers.

Apart from this California law for employers, members of the California Bar have to go through similar indoctrination to comply with continuing legal education requirements. For each compliance period, the Bar requires one hour of continuing legal education on the topic of “elimination of bias in the legal profession.”