Diversity training HAS UNANTICIPATED CONSEQUENCES (for use by New York Times News Service Clients) (clients in Alameda and Contra Costa counties may not use) Linda Seebach is the editorial page editor of the Valley Times (Pleasanton) and San Ramon Valley Times (Danville). Readers may write to her care of the paper at P.O. Box 607, Pleasanton CA 94566 or at Valleytms(at)aol.com by e-mail. Diversity training produces unmeasurable results One of the persistent perplexities in the field of "diversity management" is why it's so difficult to demonstrate positive results. The general principle seems sound: People differ in many important ways and they and their employers will be more successful if managers are responsive to those differences. Teachers don't treat all their students alike; parents don't even treat all their children alike. Yet some of the companies, or public agencies, that have implemented that principle most aggressively in their training policies have had the worst results. The "jelly bean" metaphor that humiliated Texaco had its origin in a diversity exercise, though it apparently wasn't used in quite the same spirit that diversity trainers intend. In another notorious example, the Federal Aviation Administration had to settle a complaint about a 1992 training session in which men were expected to run a gantlet of women who groped them and made suggestive comments. How does such a sensible notion go so far awry? That's the question Fred Lynch examines in his most recent book, "The Diversity Machine." Lynch is a sociologist and a visiting professor at Claremont-McKenna College. He was intrigued that sociology as a discipline had done almost no research on affirmative action, one of the most far-reaching efforts ever to change the fundamental relationships of society. So he began such a study and over a five-year period was well-placed to observe the shift from affirmative action, narrowly focused on race and gender, toward a broader concept of diversity. The advocates of affirmative action tend to a crusading zeal that grew out of the civil-rights movement, while diversity managers offer a button-down, bottom-line pragmatism to companies seeking to compete in a global marketplace. They may agree that a workplace dominated by white males, as they perceive it to be, needs to be changed, but they have incompatible ideas about what the changes should be. Another problem is what Lynch calls the "diversity paradox"; trying to explain how people of one sort or another prefer to be treated may create more stereotypes than it dispels. Navigating among these conflicting priorities can result in training efforts that make everybody feel good but don't really change anything. If the diversity machine hasn't trundled through your office yet, this is one of its favorite exercises you may not have seen. The person leading it, the facilitator, asks for volunteers for a role-playing game. Around the neck of each of the six to eight people chosen he hangs a sign identifying that person's role in the game; they can see everyone else's sign, but not their own. Then he gives them some innocuous corporate task to do -- planning the company picnic, say -- and instructs them to treat everyone else in the group according to the sign they wear. It is astonishing how fast people adapt to the roles forced upon them, even though they don't know explicitly what those roles are. That's the point of the exercise. The first time I saw this done, one woman wore the sign "leader." People asked her opinion, and deferred to her, and she did, by golly, begin to lead. The people who drew negative signs, "laugh at me," "not quite bright," quickly became defensive and then hostile or sullen. Watch the exercise several times, however, as I have, and the message gradually becomes more ambiguous. One time, the sign "stacked babe" was taped to a decidedly masculine volunteer. The facilitator had to prompt the group a bit, because everybody wanted to make nice and they all knew about sexual harassment in the office. But they got into it. "Stacked babe" elicits very different social behavior than "attractive woman." The men hit on "her," and as soon as they did the women turned catty. Not very edifying, perhaps, but the conclusion I draw is that all these people had a sophisticated knowledge of the social roles everyone was playing, and could easily modify their own behavior to match an agreed-on scenario. That weakens the argument that people have difficulty adapting to "diverse" workplaces because they can't overcome their habitual responses to people different from themselves. In fact they have no problem at all behaving in ways contrary to the plain evidence of their senses, given a plausible reason for doing so. A deeper problem with the exercise is that it ignores the process by which signs are matched with people in the real world. When we're not playing games, we mostly earn the signs we wear. Some people are leaders, by rank or by temperament, and paying no attention to the fact is a prescription for corporate suicide. Some people really are "not quite bright"; should co-workers make allowances for that or pretend it isn't so? Are we teaching people to pay more attention to labels, or less? That's the diversity paradox in action. SCHOOL DISPUTE TESTS BOUNDARIES OF FREE SPEECH (for use by New York Times News Service Clients) (clients in Alameda and Contra Costa counties may not use) Linda Seebach is the editorial page editor of the Valley Times (Pleasanton) and San Ramon Valley Times (Danville). Readers may write to her care of the paper at P.O. Box 607, Pleasanton CA 94566 or at Valleytms(at)aol.com by e-mail. After months of internal conflict at a school in Livermore, Calif., a fact-finding panel at East Avenue Middle School has issued its interim report, and the most interesting of its generally innocuous findings has to do with the press. "The Panel believes," the report says, "it is generally counterproductive for staff members, parents and volunteers to publicly air their disputes through the vehicle of letters to the editor or other public announcements." There's certainly been a lot of public airing, and to the extent that some of it has been quite disagreeable that probably has been counterproductive. But the fact that it's public is not part of the problem. At East Avenue, there are genuine disagreements about legitimate policy issues of great importance to parents. The panel says "personality issues dominate the discussion," but people could be friends all round and still not agree on the best way to teach mathematics. Parents and children have the largest stake in this game, and they should have been in on the discussions from the start, with a chance to hear all viewpoints presented fully and fairly. That would simply have been good management, and the school administrators are the ones to blame because it didn't happen. The teachers who believed their side wasn't being heard also felt that they had an obligation to make sure it was. It's less clear than you might think, however, that they had a constitutionally protected right to go public with their disagreements. The Bill of Rights recognizes citizens' freedoms from government control. People are often surprised to hear that they do not, as a rule, have any First Amendment rights vis-à-vis their employers. "I didn't give up my civil rights when I became a journalist!" a friend declared. But he's correct only in the sense that he didn't have them to give up. Newspapers can, and routinely do, require reporters to limit their political activities, and there's no constitutional difficulty with that. In some cases this is clear to everyone. Imagine a hypothetical company that settles on a new product line after a bruising internal debate. If the executive who championed the losing side sent out letters to all the company's customers explaining how inferior the new widgets were, he wouldn't be working there much longer. The reader who wrote in a letter to the editor that the teachers' actions "sat squarely in the arena of insubordination [and] willful misconduct" had a point, although she didn't express it very graciously. But teachers in a public school work for the government, and so they have somewhat more latitude to say what they think about the institution they work for than people in private industry. For their speech as employees to be protected, it must deal with a matter of public concern. Curriculum disputes certainly meet that test. Beyond, that, though, the legal ground gets mushy. If the disruption caused by what's said outweighs its value, officials may have grounds to restrict it in advance or to sanction employees in some way for what they've said or written. That's hard to measure. Have some of the comments and documents that have been flying around, from whatever source, caused disruption? Interfered with working relationships? Damaged morale? Sure. Did the disruption outweigh the benefits? Not clear. The letter writer also ran into some disruption, including a campaign by some teachers to end her work with the school. The teachers' effort was out of line, I think, and the principal, Mike Hazelhofer, was correct to defend her rights to express herself in the newspaper. But the rules should be the same for everyone; if parents and school volunteers are permitted to write letters then teachers should be too. School administrators, and other public officials, might be able to prohibit public comment and make it stick. Courts generally will defer to their judgment, not that anyone wants this catfight to end up in court. Just because they can shut down public debate, though, doesn't mean they should: education is too important for decisions about it to be made behind closed doors by a few people who believe they're experts. On the other hand, just because teachers can say most of what they want to doesn't mean they should, either. "Communication clearly is a two-way street," the fact-finding panel wrote, "and when communication suffers or breaks down it is not usually productive to attempt to assess blame or point fingers." But it certainly is tempting, and too many people at East Avenue have fallen into temptation. The administrators who will be coming to East Avenue should make every effort to ensure that the debate over what to do with the mathematics program is extensive and public. Then they will be much firmer ground in insisting that it also be civil and professional. For people who dread filling out their income tax return even more than paying the taxes, part of January's chill every year is the appearance of Form 1040 and its many schedules in the mailbox. Taxes may be the price we pay for living in a civilized society, as the adage has it, but how high does the price have to be? One group, Americans for Tax Reform, calculated that in 1996, July 3 was the first day of the year that Americans could work for themselves; for the first 185 days of the year, all their efforts went toward paying the cost of taxes and regulation. The "government work days" include 51 days for state and local impositions, 40 for the cost of complying with federal regulations, 31 for Social Security and Medicare, 16 days for defense, 14 days to pay interest on the national debt and 32 days for everything else the federal government does. That's not entirely fair. Some regulations are useless or even harmful, but many of them simply codify actions that prudent individuals and businesses would be doing anyway. If the Federal Aviation Administration ceased to exist, airlines would not immediately cancel all safety programs (though they might decide it was not essential to instruct every passenger on how to fasten and release seat belts). The prospect of negligence lawsuits, if nothing more high-minded, would figure into their calculations. The group estimates the total cost of regulation at $1 trillion, but there's no way to figure how much of that staggering bill covers policies and procedures that wouldn't exist except that the government requires them. Another way to look at taxes is to calculate how large a share of the typical family budget they take. You may remember that Bob Dole was hammered during the campaign for saying that Americans paid more in taxes than for food, clothing and shelter combined. But he was right. In 1996, according to the Tax Foundation, the average American household spent $19,292 on food, clothing and shelter, while the estimated total tax burden was $21,883. One difference between their figures and those of, for instance, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is that they include the taxes that people pay indirectly, like the corporate income tax and the employer's share of Social Security and Medicare. That is fair, because ultimately individuals pay all taxes. And the foundation counts taxes as taxes, even if they are associated with food or housing. Also fair; property taxes are a significant share of rent or mortgage payments, even in California after Proposition 13. The burden of taxes on an average family is much greater than it used to be. A typical family budget 40 years ago included 19.9 percent for federal taxes and 7.8 percent for state and local taxes. In 1996, the estimated tax bill was 26.7 percent for federal taxes and 11.7 percent for state and local taxes. Granted, people are earning more than they did then. But they haven't benefited as much as they should have, with food dropping from 18.6 percent of the family budget to 9.2 percent, and clothing, housing, transportation all taking a smaller share. Saving is down too. Only medical spending is up, from 3.8 percent to 10.5 percent. It's worth remembering that in the '50s, the average family with two incomes was paying only $84 a year to Social Security. That's in actual dollars, not adjusted for inflation. In 1996, it was $3,899. Total taxes, and these are adjusted to 1996 dollars, were $6,665 in 1956 compared with almost $22,000 last year. Are Americans better off as a result of paying three times as much in taxes as their parents did? Not obviously. But are Americans better off, taxwise, than people in other countries? A survey in the Economist suggests that they are. The Economist did its own calculations of "tax freedom day" for different countries. Their measure was more restrictive than the one I started with, and it gives the United States credit for tax freedom starting April 11. Japan's only a day later, and the only country that is earlier is Singapore, which lays claim to March 4. The European economies carry a greater burden -- Britain May 9, Germany May 23, France June 12 and Sweden July 3. And many show it with levels of unemployment that haven't been seen in the United States since the Great Depression. They look with envy toward America's powerful job-creation machine. Despite that, attempts to cut back the "cradle-to-grave" welfare state are being bitterly resisted. That's not the direction the United States should be heading. We don't really mind paying taxes. But we're paying enough.