Why Has the Diversity Industry Promised So Much and Delivered So Little?

In recent years, a large, loose industry of diversity experts has had a tremendous impact on organizations of all sizes, promising to improve intergroup relations and make life easier for members of traditionally marginalized groups facing discrimination and ostracization. Ranging from psychologists to activists to consultants, these entrepreneurs have developed and popularized a variety of cutting-edge concepts that, they claim, are key to such efforts: implicit bias, white fragility, affinity groups, and others. While accurate numbers are hard to come by, a conservative estimate suggests hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on these approaches. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence any of them actually work, and solid circumstantial evidence some of them could have the exact opposite of their intended effect. Jesse Singal, a journalist and author who has been writing about the diversity industry for almost a decade, will explain the current lay of the land, why popular but bankrupt approaches catch on, and what a better, more evidence-based approach to diversity would look like.