In September, when a federal judge partially blocked Florida’s “Stop Woke Act,” which would have banned workplaces from holding mandatory trainings on race- or sex-based discrimination, it was considered a victory for diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs. But this ignores the fact that DEI training, since it began in the 1960s, has fallen far short of its goals.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s recent lawsuits against two separate Florida companies for race discrimination, harassment and retaliation serve as evidence of these shortcomings. One of the lawsuits was against a construction company in Orlando where a Black employee alleged that a white supervisor told him “we say the N-word here a lot.” That same employee, according to the EEOC complaint, was humiliated by a different white manager who rammed a shovel between his legs. These incidents occurred despite the fact that the two companies tout standards of employee integrity, professionalism and teamwork on their websites.
Across the United States, companies spent nearly $8 billion on workplace DEI training in 2020, and a new report shows that companies intend to increase their DEI budgets by 79% in 2022. But despite these high expenditures, evidence shows that DEI programs — at least in their current forms — typically fail to achieve their intended outcomes for persons across gender, race, ability, age, religion, neurodiversity, sexuality, geographic, educational, cultural and socioeconomic identities.
