A growing number of empirical studies suggest that anti-bias training (also known as implicit bias training) and other diversity initiatives don’t work. A recent
study by sociologists Frank Dobbin at Harvard University and Alexandra Kalev at Tel Aviv University, surveying more than 30 years of data collected from over 800 firms, found that diversity programs not only failed to increase workplace diversity, but in many cases even
reduced diversity or exacerbated participants’ biases. A 2016 meta-analysis of nearly 500 studies on implicit bias interventions similarly found that while such sessions sometimes briefly and slightly diminished participants’ implicit biases, they had no significant long-term effects on people’s behavior or attitudes. And in 2019,
another study of diversity training programs by a team of behavioral scientists further confirmed that onetime interventions designed to reduce implicit bias—the type used by the vast majority of employers and institutions—tend not to change very many minds at all.