It's not a win if unconscious bias training doesn't actually work. I have yet to see it change the behavior of racist people. Do you have any papers that show that it works?
So far it just seems like a way for a company to cover their ass via a PR stunt that disrupts a bunch of employees' days.
> So far it just seems like a way for a company to cover their ass via a PR stunt that disrupts a bunch of employees' days.
Quick question - do you feel the same about sexual harassment training? I think it's good for every employee to be clear on the common baseline on what behavior the company deems unacceptable and the consequences thereof.
Let's detach this from racism for a moment, and hypothesize on ethics. A number of companies have/had issues with staff members virtually stalking users. Would you rather colleagues not report such incidents for fear of creating legal liability? Should the companies not have a policy against this and offer training on ethical handling of user data? No amount of company training will cure an engineer's creepiness, but drawing lines in the sand is important - it might prevent creepy behavior while they are on the clock - even if it may look like its CYA.
Things that come from a CYA perspective are compromised. The motivation is to check a box at the lowest available cost, which is not the recipe for competence. It's not hard to screw something like that up and end up training people to consciously consider race when making decisions.
There is legitimately a trade off between honestly convincing people to care about something and passing laws requiring them to appear to care about it under penalty of financial liability.
Fortunately there is a win-win solution to this - unconscious bias training! Minority employee and manager's lives get a little easier, company shows that it cares and made corrective/CYA action, any employee who discriminates on race will clearly be doing it against company policy. Pretending like it didn't happen is the worst policy, IMO, because it gives an impression of condoning such behaviour, which creates more liability.