Diversity is not going to be fixed with another training course

A few years ago I attended a disability diversity training course for television execs on how to manage disabled staff better.

This is an incredibly important issue as disabled people are possibly the most under-represented group when it comes to working in film and television. Only 0.3% of the total film workforce are disabled, according to the UK film industry body Creative Skillset, despite the fact that 19% of the working age population are disabled.

During the session we were made to sit in our office chairs and see how difficult it is to reach things placed on a high shelf - to illustrate some of the challenges facing wheelchair users.

We were told to think of Gorden Brown as the UK’s “first disabled prime minister”, due to his lack of vision in one eye, and he was an example of how the “skies are the limit” for disabled people.

I was also told other facts about disabled people such as the difficulty of navigating street furniture (lamp posts, benches, etc) and why we should not schedule meetings in inaccessible offices.

The session was portrayed as a “judgement free space” and we were encouraged to raise any issues we had as managers when working with disabled staff.

Midway through the session I brought up the very practical difficulty of how career structures seem to work against many disabled people in production.

In a nutshell the problem is this: Most people in factual productions get their big break from researcher to director by first self-shooting stuff themselves on small cameras. Self-shooting is a hard physical activity which works against the interests of many disabled people and can mean many disabled people find themselves hitting a glass-ceiling at researcher level.

I told the organisers of the session that I wanted to know how we could solve this problem as opposed to worrying about street furniture of putting books on shelves which are too high.

My concerns were not answered and the session continued by discussing which words are most offensive when talking about disability.

It would be churlish of me to say that I did not learn anything from the session. There is no doubt that spending a day discussing disability issues in a session being led by a professional moderator gave all of us a deeper understanding of what life is like for many people with disabilities.

However what the session did not give us was any clear guidance on what practical steps we could take to employ more disabled people and overcome some of the structural problems when it comes to promotion and retention.

A new study published in April of this year found that my experience of diversity training sessions was very typical. Concentrating on gender diversity training a group of professors from Wharton business school in the US conducted an experiment with over 3,000 participants in one global organization. They gave the participants a gender based diversity course based on the best practices available in the market.

They then followed up the course five months later to see what, if anything, had changed.

What they discovered is diversity training often led to a change in the way people viewed the under-represented group. But it did not lead to any change in behaviours that could have helped the under-represented group.

Awareness did not translate into action.

So what does this mean? Should we simply junk diversity courses?

My view is that a company’s culture is essential when it comes to diversity, and that culture is shaped by people’s awareness at all levels. In that respect diversity courses are very important.

However, if my experience and the Wharton professors are right, all courses do is create an environment where staff might be more favourable to diversity. It is then the role of management to identify structural issues hindering diversity and implement new policies to actually overcome those issues.

Or to put it another way: Diversity courses are no substitute for good diversity policies.