Beyond the various discussions around DEI—and whether it’s good, bad, or somewhere in between—there’s a deeper conversation happening between DEI practitioners: how do you create and execute DEI training that will resonate with workers?

This comes at a time when some companies, including AT&T, Meta, and Molson Coors, have ended DEI training as part of wider DEI rollbacks, and as the Trump administration has publicly denounced them.

DEI practitioners committed to improving the efficacy of their trainings, despite all the noise, first need to understand the history of these initiatives, including the aspects that haven’t worked.

A (brief) history lesson. Diversity training dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and discrimination lawsuits that followed, according to an article from Kira Lussier, a researcher at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

The early years of diversity in the workforce focused mostly on Title VII compliance, according to a 2008 academic paper co-written by Rohini Anand, former SVP of corporate responsibility and global chief inclusion belonging officer at Sodexo, and Mary-Frances Winters, founder and CEO of the Winters Group consultancy. They wrote that trainings were typically a one-and-done, four-hour event that often failed to relate teachings to the potential business impacts.

The courses gained momentum in the 1980s, after Price Cobbs, a Black psychiatrist and diversity consultant, created Valuing Diversity, a video series that became popular across corporate America. But even then, white workers resented the training, Lussier wrote.

Diversity training expanded between the late 1980s and the turn of the century, as companies shifted from a compliance focus (centering women and racial minorities) to a more holistic, justice-centered approach, which broadened to focus on everyone, Anand and Winters found. While they did touch on sensitivity and the relationship between diversity and business outcomes, they did not have a set curriculum to help address bias in the workplace.

As diversity training continued growing in the 1990s, resistance remained as well. A white man who was interviewed for a 1994 article in Bloomberg said the DEI training he attended at work made him feel like he was to blame for injustices like slavery and the glass ceiling. “I became bitter and remain so,” he told Bloomberg.

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