Equal Employment, Diversity Training, and Inclusion

Successful management of a diverse workforce poses many challenges in the confusing aspects of diversity that exist in today's workplace. Equal employment opportunity is an attempt to pay retribution for past errors and many say it was a good beginning but more is needed. We commonly read and hear the increasingly popular term diversity training. The new catchphrase to be found gaining popularity in the workforce is inclusion. With all these confusing concepts, just how can management develop a successful strategy to manage a diverse workforce?

The term diversity needs to be defined, as it is applicable in the workplace. Equal Employment Opportunity focused primarily on gender and race. Diversity, though, is filled with many more criteria than just gender and race. Diversity is defined in one article ("Value of Cultural Diversity," 1997) as "not part of the mainstream, popular culture. In this nation, our popular culture, or ideal business success, is white, young, heterosexual, Christian, and male." This description, while blunt, may indeed reflect what diversity in the workforce represents. Anyone in the workforce who does not meet the criteria stated in the article would be an example of diversity. When we add age, marital or family status, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and disabilities the pool of a diverse workforce outside of gender and race gets rather deep indeed. Management strategies must adapt to be effective in managing this expanded diverse workforce.

Management in America has historically always dealt with a diverse workforce. During the days under British colonialism a majority of the workforce were religious minorities, political dissidents, minor criminals, and indentured servants from Britain. Further diversifying the workforce was the practice of importing African slaves. After the American Independence, the American workforce began seeing many German and Irish immigrants who were Roman Catholic, which increased as the nineteenth century progressed. Actually, according to Hatton and Williamson (1998), during the second half of the nineteenth century, " the rate of Irish emigration was more than double that of any other European country, with as many as 13 per thousand emigrating each year". While the Irish were flooding the workforce from Europe, the Chinese were also flowing into the American workforce from the Far East. As we move forward to examine the early twentieth century, we find a huge influx of rural southern black workers into the northern urban workplace due to many factors including manpower shortage due to the War and a lack of employment in the south. Wynn (1993) states " between 1910 and 1920, the black population of the North rose by 700,000, and that by 1930 nearly 1 million blacks had left the south". Currently, according to the 2000 Decennial Census the labor force participation rates by whites (67.4 percent), blacks (65.8 percent), and Hispanics (68.6 percent) find that although very close, clearly the workplace is diversified, as the same census informs us that our current immigrant workforce is 12.6 percent. There is no question that America has always had and continues to have a diverse workforce. Now we look to strategies to manage such a diverse workforce.

Diversity training, the popular catchphrase in the workplace seems to be the answer. Is this in fact the answer to managing a diverse workforce? Let's explore these programs and find the answer. Despite many programs in diversity training, they fail to break the promotion barriers as Wilson (1995) notes " to date, diversity programs appear to have had little impact on breaking the glass ceiling that keeps women, African- Americans, and other minorities group members from advancing into the upper echelons". How successful should we consider this diversity training? As stated above, America has always retained a diverse workforce. In the name of political correctness, it seems we have a program named diversity training. After researching this trend one wonders if it is not blatant racism. That young, white, Christian, men and women are demonized in many diversity-training courses points to some form of dicrimination, as Lynch (1995) informs us, "the filed is rife with 'blow-ups' - as occurred when several senior executives ... stormed out of a simulation exercise after being told to sit on the floor as member of an 'oppressed group'". Lynch also adds another incidence to demonstrate this demonizing behavior stating that a diversity trainer "persistently badgered a white male graduate student, impugning the student's family and stating the recent death of his father 'removed one more racist influence' from his life. As Damask