Yahoo Finance Ditch 'woke' agenda and unconscious bias training, bosses told
Companies have “wasted a fortune” trying to make middle-aged white men more "woke" in failed attempts to improve diversity, consultants have argued.
Mind Gym, which advises blue-chip companies on workplace culture, said businesses should stop investing in “ineffective but expensive” strategies such as unconscious bias training and focus instead on realising the potential of new leaders from non-traditional backgrounds.
Joanne Cash, chairman of Mind Gym, warned that training strategies intended to combat racism and sexism can risk making wealthy white men feel they're "being told off for who they are", while ignoring issues such as childhood trauma, bereavement and mental health.
She said: "Even the most privileged person will have gone through life with suffering of some sort.
"Every single individual has a private story and one of the dangers we're seeing in the dialogue at the moment is that we lump people together in a very unsympathetic way."
Women and people from ethnic minorities are still underrepresented in British boardrooms despite efforts to tackle the problem by focusing on unconscious bias, a theory that people make assumptions about others without realising it.
A damning report published earlier this year found that no black directors hold any of the top boardroom jobs at Britain's FTSE 100 companies for the first time since 2014.
Due to the lack of progress, Mind Gym said it is now advising clients such as US pharma business AbbVie and City insurer Gallagher to swap unconscious bias training for a programme that focuses on "the nuances of diversity and why we can all feel left out at times".
Ms Cash said conversations around diversity in the workplace have become divisive and are failing to promote social mobility, with unconscious bias training in fact making some people even less empathetic of others.
She said: "A more nuanced conversation is needed in the workplace if we're going to achieve permanent change - there’s no point castigating one group of people in order to promote another.
“If there's a risk that one group feels they're being told off for who they are, you're leaving an entire group of people not feeling very good about themselves. It doesn't need to feel divisive.”
Ministers last year scrapped unconscious bias sessions for civil servants in England, claiming that they do not work.
Google spent $114m (£81m) on diversity programmes in 2014, but just 3.3pc of its workforce and 2.6pc of its leadership was made up of black people after the training had completed.
Mind Gym’s report argued that people who take part in unconscious bias training behave less inclusively afterwards than they did before.
Bill Michael, KPMG’s former chairman, stood down earlier this year following an outburst during a virtual meeting in which he said “unconscious bias is complete c---”.
Mr Michael said his position had become untenable following a backlash from staff after he told them that "after every single unconscious bias training that's ever been done, nothing's ever improved. So unless you care, you actually won’t change."
Last week, US podcast host Joe Rogan also attracted widespread criticism for suggesting that the trajectory of “woke” culture is such that eventually “straight, white men won’t be able to talk”.
