File this under "Post-Modern Cognitive Dissonance" - "Diversity training doesn't extinguish prejudice. It promotes it."

Well, of course it does. We all know that. The purpose of diverstity training is to create the expectation of offense that justifies more diversity training.

Saying it, however, is very un-PC, but this article at CBS does say it:

"Diversity training doesn't extinguish prejudice. It promotes it," says Peter Bregman in Psychology Today. He's not alone in his belief. Walter Olson at Overlawyered.com has collected numerous articles detailing why diversity training doesn't actually make people more tolerant. In fact, it can open your company to lawsuits, as the Federal Aviation Administration found out way back in 1995.

Bregman reports:

A study of 829 companies over 31 years showed that diversity training had "no positive effects in the average workplace." Millions of dollars a year were spent on the training resulting in, well, nothing. Attitudes -- and the diversity of the organizations -- remained the same.

It gets worse. The researchers -- Frank Dobbin of Harvard, Alexandra Kalev of Berkeley, and Erin Kelly of the University of Minnesota -- concluded that "In firms where training is mandatory or emphasizes the threat of lawsuits, training actually has negative effects on management diversity."

You would think that we would have learned something over the years, and stopped doing ridiculous trainings where we try to come up with the proper thing to say for every possible scenario. That, of course, is impossible. Add to that the fact that people hate any kind of mandatory training that they don't see as applicable to their jobs, and you end up with a situation where people think that A.) As long as they follow the exact formula explained in the the training when those exact situations occur they are fine; and B.) Joking about the boring and irrelevant nature of the training is fine. You end up with disaster.

Phil Bowermaster follows up on this article:

I worked for a large telecom company back in the 90′s where they had a huge mandatory diversity (they called it “pluralism” back in those days) training effort. The main class had an exercise in which people wrote down every “fact” they could think of related to various ethnicities and religions and the two genders. These were written on huge post-it notes that were then stuck on to people representing the various groups. It was a great exercise. Seeing these people covered with these big sheets of paper — some saying good things about them; some, bad — really drove the point home that it’s almost impossible to value people as individuals if we insist on labeling them.

Later in the day the organizers of the training would try to get people to sign up for more advanced classes. I remember looking through the list an seeing a class entitled (and I’m not kidding, this is really what it was called) “White Male-ism.”

So I guess we have to label some people, after all.

Thus my first suggestion on how to make diversity training more effective: no double standards.

Same class, I remember we spent some time talking about the hidden sexism and racism in everyday speech. One of the things we were told to avoid saying was “rule of thumb.” According to the class, that expression comes from English common law, which said that it is permissible for a man to beat his wife with a stick as thick as his thumb, but no thicker.

So, the thinking went, anyone who uses the expression “rule of thumb” is essentially endorsing domestic violence. I actually spoke up at this point, protesting that people who had no idea about the origin of this phrase weren’t endorsing anything, and asked whether it really made sense to find offense where none was remotely intended.

At that stage I was granted the same pariah status that Suzanne Lucas and Peter Bergman are now enjoying.

Later I learned that there is no evidence linking the phrase “rule of thumb” to that appalling guideline about beating-stick circumference (which does have backing in a couple of U. S. cases, but which doesn’t appear to show up anywhere in the Common Law.)

So there’s no reason to be offended by the phrase “rule of thumb.” However, the About.com article linked in the previous paragraph suggests we should avoid using it because some people might be offended by it. And how would they have come to be offended by it? Probably from something they learned in diversity training.

So my second modest suggestion for diversity training: don’t invent new ways for people to be offended.