Does Diversity Training Work The Way It’s Supposed To? with Edward Chang, Assistant Professor at HBS

Although diversity training is commonplace in organizations, the relative scarcity of field experiments testing its effectiveness leaves ambiguity about whether diversity training improves attitudes and behaviors toward women and racial minorities. In this seminar, Harvard Business School Professor Edward Chang will present the results of a large field experiment with an international organization testing whether a short online diversity training can affect attitudes and workplace behaviors. Although there is some evidence of attitude change and limited behavior change as a result of the training, the results suggest that the one-off diversity trainings that are commonplace in organizations are not panaceas for remedying bias in the workplace.

Edward H. Chang (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor in the Negotiation, Organizations and Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. His primary research interests include diversity, discrimination, and behavior change. His work has been published in journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Academy of Management Journal, and Management Science. Prior to a career in academia, Edward worked as a data scientist for technology startups. He received his PhD in Operations, Information and Decisions from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and he graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy.