Diversity training - who's benefiting?

[Wherearemyminions]

Been mulling over the rise in the "industry" of delivering training etc around diversity, with the recent huge emphasis on T.

Now I've probably been a bit slow on the uptake but bloody hell, it's a lucrative no brainer isn't it? The current big thing - what school/company/public body would risk not being seen to be doing all the right things and happy to pay for it/apply for funding for it.

From a professional perspective I can't see how the results of this money being spent is actually measurable, other than boxes being ticked. Everything I have seen is just a mixture of common sense (be nice to other people) and some woolly flimflam with buzzwords.

So, happy to be told I'm being a bit tinfoil hat but who ultimately is benefiting from this gravy train? Where does this trail lead?

I couldn’t have justified refusing the ‘opportunity’, or explained walking out, so I sat through it and dealt with the consequences on my own time.

hipster, I'm so sorry to hear that - because of course if you had walked out, and, even if you had not been obliged to explain your actions (which you probably would have), the very fact of your leaving the session would have said something about you to your employer and your colleagues.

Its also worth considering who loses with the focus on "T".

There is a place for understanding and consideration in the workplace.

I once worked somewhere quite "posh", three OEs in my department alone. A smallish issue but I ended up having to learn a whole set of Latin and cricket vocabulary. "Cop" anyone?

A good manager might probably want to understand that it can be wise to schedule major meetings early in the day during Ramadan if there are observant Muslim staff. They might want to be able to understand more about someones disability in order to support them, and indeed what they are allowed to ask and how best to do so - DH once had someone transferred into his team with HR flagging up there were health issues. Trouble is that they could not tell him what these issues were and he felt unable to ask, despite the fact the person was having to take large amounts of time off work normally with no notice. And still work to be done of LGB acceptance. (DD shocked to be "accused" by a home counties middle class girl from a sought after state school, of being lesbian. Apparently women who play sport are lesbians. If this is typical, there is a concern that focusing on the "T" may be damaging lesbian acceptance.)

There is lots of diversity and equalities stuff which, if handled sensitively, would help people become better managers and better team members.

Instead the Stonewall stuff is likely to make people dig in and reject training, or at best suggest that men, often middle-class white men are a priority for diversity initiatives. How convenient.

There’s a certain erosion of boundaries with a lot of this diversity training - NOBODY should be unwillingly sharing personal information or made to reveal their sexuality or any other belief.

^ absolutely!

Thankfully my organisation operates like something from Noah's Ark and training on anything is appalling, so I should be spared this for ever some time.

I don’t take kindly to Myers Briggs stuff either. Mainly because it’s pseudoscientific nonsense, but also because, in my view, it’s part of the same thing.

At my previous workplace (very large business, mainly white middle class men) all staff were required to complete an 'unconscious bias' web based training session. There was a lot of talk before hand about what a market leading (which I take as code for quite expensive) tool this was, how important it was to be encourage diversity in the workplace, and a big emphasis placed on encouraging women and people from 'other' backgrounds to join the industry.

This made absolutely no difference to behaviour in the workplace- especially when it came to the way women were treated. Many of the most senior (male) members of staff actually had their (female) secretaries log in to their computers and complete the training for them. Yet they got to tick a box and put a lot of words on their recruitment pages about how diverse they were.

I bet there's a self-licensing effect from some of these initiatives.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing

Delving into people's psyches should only be undertaken by qualified and supervised mental health professionals, in a therapeutic context, for the benefit of the individual; anything else seems to me to be risky and unethical.

Absolutely, those participating must have given informed consent without coersion to take part & be protected by all of the standard ethical frameworks.

Thank you all, having a quick catch up now but will read properly after work, some very interesting points.

But wouldn’t diversity training tend to fall outside such frameworks?

Granted it’s an extreme example, but the first time I heard about the blue-eye/brown-eye experiment, which has been used relatively recently, it seemed psychologically abusive.

Less extreme types of training may still present risks to the vulnerable, but falls into a grey area of little to no oversight.

Had another look at the “genderbread” diagram again today, and just the same thought occurred to me. Creating “issues” out of non issues. Creating definitions out of the air - “gender identity”, and “gender presentation” so that these things need to be discussed, talked about, lectured on. Schools get someone to to do it, pay for that someone, so that boxes are ticked.
Trouble is, kids then think they have to make decisions about these things, and waste brain cell space on thinking about it.
Yes, we should be aware of difference, and non discrimination, but most of this stuff is entirely relevant. Can’t gelieve that trans education seems to be trumping discussions about misogyny, and sexism given the very real rise in sexual assaults in schools, universities.

Less extreme types of training may still present risks to the vulnerable, but falls into a grey area of little to no oversight.

This is the problem. It seems that no one (to my knowledge) is carrying out systematic studies of the weird and wonderful 'training' courses that now populate the world of work like so many viruses. It all seems to have originated in America with the personality testing that hipster referenced.

It is by no means restricted to diversity training. I saw a documentary made in France called the Death of Work. In it, some male managers from a car windscreen fitting company were made to participate in some meaningless games that were, to my mind, humiliating. The makers later interviewed the trainer who had clearly had a nervous breakdown and was leaving work to run a B&B. In other scenes, some clearly alienated young workers at a call centre were complaining that their training required them to show love for the faceless corporation in which they were trapped.

It would require some serious independent studies to determine what the hell is really going on - but I doubt that will happen.

The Stonewall agenda actually promotes division with its relentless categorisation of people into LGBT and non-LGBT, role models and allies. The message is "diverse individual" rather than a diverse workforce.

We did something at work about unconscious bias but at least you did the preparation at home and the actual session was very fact based and did not involve people having to share personal experiences. As we know from the Mermaids training, the content is not really very sophisticated and trainers may have no experience in dealing with people who have been through distressing events. Agree with the posters who think a lot of this is about ticking boxes and 'virtue signalling'.

It's a case of the king told the queen and the queen told the dairymaid.

Government tells local authorities diversity targets must be set/here's advice and white papers.

Local authorities obediently set up diversity teams (or a team per particular need) and give them a manager and job descriptions.

They write their policies and action plans, which have to fulfil authority targets and demonstrate worth and value for money and reach and impact, and justifies their funding, so they rush out and start training and informing and guiding policies being written which generates nice data to give back to government. They have to demonstrate community links too, so charities and local groups and they all have coffee together and align their messages and support each other's reach, and that generates even nicer data.

The training and policies have impact on the trained who have been told they need this training and must act on it, and are having their policies examined and funding getting dependent on having evidenced they've done it. And they start putting it into job descriptions and action plans and sending people out to get trained.

The Local Authority team then re write their next year's action plan and have to go further and deeper and incorporate line 8 of this guidance and paragraph 5 of that guidance, and mission creep begins. The job gets bigger, the brief gets wider, the stretch gets wider because stats and funding justification for jobs has to be met, not to mention people now spending their working lives focused on it. And so it rolls on until some very very expensive consultant assesses the LA data and says why the heck are you paying all these people to rush around doing this when you can't afford things like CAMHS?

The job gets bigger, the brief gets wider, the stretch gets wider because stats and funding justification for jobs has to be met, not to mention people now spending their working lives focused on it. And so it rolls on until some very very expensive consultant assesses the LA data and says why the heck are you paying all these people to rush around doing this when you can't afford things like CAMHS?

Absolutely - until you have a whole group of people who find that they now have a certain amount of power over others and can train them to say that men are women and insist that they show evidence that their inner world now lines up with their training. And all of this slots very nicely into the training madness that has been going on for years and which is now a multi-million-pound industry. And, even worse, there is no one policing these so-called trainers to make sure that they are not abusing their powers by, for instance, telling people that self-id is now law.

This training organisation near me is literally called the Diversity Trust - here's a report they produced with Healthwatch, the publicly funded body which represents patients and care users. Quick highlights: It states in the glossary that 'Trans Woman is a subset of Woman' and 'Trans Men is a subset of Man'. Also that 'cisgenderism' is equivalent to racism and sexism. It recommends Mermaids. Survey respondents 90% white. References to 'Intersex Identities' and intersex 'inbetween' genitals. The survey results say 57% 'feel reasonably happy', and yet 70% report suicidal ideation. (Almost as if there's a script to follow - the pushing of the idea that part of being trans is being suicidal is one of the most wildly irresponsible aspects of trans activism). Lots of focus on hair removal and misgendering. I don't know how much influence this report has had on the NHS, I can only hope not much as the quality is so low. www.diversitytrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Healthwatch-Trans-Health-Care-and-Wellbeing-Report-03.04.18.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3zHgkfcpKcn7O5NhTt_K45YSa1ATjIQb7-ER3KjItftHUedW3xQk3atOA

JFC, that report you linked severnbore.

"Cisgenderism is a prejudice similar to racism and sexism. It denies, ignores, denigrates, or stigmatises non-cisgender, Transgender, forms of expression, behaviour, relationship, or community."

www.urbandictionary.com:
"Cisgenderism is a prejudice similar to racism and sexism. It denies, ignores, denigrates, or stigmatizes non-cisgender forms of expression, sexual activity, behavior, relationship, or community."

Forgot to add that the Urban Dictionary entry predates the report by several years and seems to be the original source for this definition.

Trouble is, kids then think they have to make decisions about these things, and waste brain cell space on thinking about it.

Can’t gelieve that trans education seems to be trumping discussions about misogyny, and sexism given the very real rise in sexual assaults in schools, universities.

Abso fucking loutely.

Purported good spot! It makes my blood boil that people who copy and paste from urbandictionary get paid to write reports while an army of women is doing such high quality work for nothing. Well, nothing plius abuse, smears etc etc. And still the 'nothing to see here' attitude from our betters.

Is anyone in the market providing woman-friendly diversity training at least, if it has to be mandatory? Or has anyone got a good in-house diversity training strategy/model they can share?

Forgot to add that the Urban Dictionary entry predates the report by several years and seems to be the original source for this definition.

Who, pray tell, is funding these people who source definitions from Urban fucking Dictionary? Please tell me it’s not us taxpayers.

Healthwatch is publicly funded. Dunno about Diversity Trust.

Perverts

Nonces

People with cluster b personality disorders

People with things to hide from scrutiny

Please tell me it’s not us taxpayers.

I'm afraid so. Police, NHS, etc.

Thread about one of the directors of Diversity Trust:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3360925-The-transwoman-voice-at-the-Womens-Equality-Party-Conference-putting-women-in-their-place

This person loves the word terf, seems to regularly meet with civil servants and is a member of the Women's Equality Party.