
Despite a recent wave of backlash in the US against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, most companies continue to measure and promote diversity in the workforce.
The majority (80%) of US companies surveyed by Teneo, a consultancy, say their DEI goals remain unchanged from 2023. In the UK, seven in 10 HR professionals say their organisations have a dedicated budget for DEI initiatives, according to a Workday survey, and more than half (56%) say they provide diversity and inclusion training for staff.
But studies have struggled to show a correlation between investment in DEI training and workforce diversity. A 31-year-long study of 829 companies, published in 2007 by the sociologists Frank Dobbin, Alexandra Kalev and Erin Kelly, found that diversity training had “no positive effects on the average workplace” and failed to increase the proportion of minority groups in management positions.
However, new field research published in the academic journal Science has found that firms can create more diverse hiring outcomes by making small tweaks to the delivery of diversity training.
Positive results
The research was led by MoreThanNow, a business consultancy and behavioural-science practice, in conjunction with academics from Exeter University, Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School. It involved 13,000 hiring managers and 350,000 job requisitions at a multinational telecommunications company between July 2021 and November 2022.
The researchers found that hiring managers who were shown a five-minute diversity training video, no more than two days before they reviewed the CVs of job applicants, were more likely to shortlist and hire candidates from under-represented backgrounds, relative to a business-as-usual scenario.
Managers who were provided this so-called behaviourally designed training were 12% more likely to shortlist women, 13% more likely to shortlist non-national candidates and 20% more likely to hire non-nationals.
“We knew that organisations were spending billions on diversity training that was aimed at changing hearts and minds and raising awareness. But there’s very little evidence this was actually changing the demographic makeup of organisations,” says Katryn Wright, managing director at MoreThanNow.
“You can gather a group of executives in a conference room and tell them wonderful things that they all agree with. But, when they go back to their desks, do they do anything differently?”
Wright and her fellow researchers sought to interrupt the usual hiring process with “focused” diversity training. Their training video urged hiring managers to base their assessments on a candidate’s skills, but reminded them to reflect on the perspectives and characteristics that are missing from their teams.
“From a behavioural perspective, unconscious-bias training is often not specific enough about what managers can do to be more inclusive leaders,” Wright adds. “Here, it was very targeted and specifically asked people to consider the diversity, inclusion and representation in their teams before making any decisions.”
Crucially, the training information in the video was presented by the company’s senior leadership, which, according to Wright, added credibility to the message. The results speak for themselves: according to the research team, women were 31% more likely to be hired after the training, and non-nationals were 51% more likely to be hired.
Beating bias
Siri Chilazi is a senior researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School and co-author of the report. She says the diversity training used by the researchers helped prevent common biases from impacting hiring decisions.
Such biases include recency bias, which can unfairly advantage candidates whose resumes were reviewed more recently, and affinity bias, the tendency of people to gravitate towards those who are similar to them.
“We tend to be more comfortable with people who are similar to us,” Chilazi explains. “If a candidate went to the same university as you, that doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on their skills, but because of that similarity you might [unintentionally] look at that person more favourably.”
Many elements of this behaviourally designed training can easily be implemented with little, if any, additional outlay. “Compared with other forms of diversity training, which can be expensive and involve external facilitators, this was much lower-cost,” Chilazi says.
So it seems that a correlation between DEI training and workplace diversity has been shown at last. Still, Chilazi says firms choosing to adopt behaviourally designed training methods must measure any outcomes to ensure they’re achieving the desired results. “But if companies want to invest in training interventions, this might be one way to make them better.”

Despite a recent wave of backlash in the US against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, most companies continue to measure and promote diversity in the workforce.
The majority (80%) of US companies surveyed by Teneo, a consultancy, say their DEI goals remain unchanged from 2023. In the UK, seven in 10 HR professionals say their organisations have a dedicated budget for DEI initiatives, according to a Workday survey, and more than half (56%) say they provide diversity and inclusion training for staff.
But studies have struggled to show a correlation between investment in DEI training and workforce diversity. A 31-year-long study of 829 companies, published in 2007 by the sociologists Frank Dobbin, Alexandra Kalev and Erin Kelly, found that diversity training had “no positive effects on the average workplace” and failed to increase the proportion of minority groups in management positions.