The Civil Rights Act of 1964, enacted by the 88th US Congress, made it illegal for employers with more than 15 workers to discriminate against employees and candidates based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
After the Act was passed, activists protested organizations who refused to hire blacks, planned jobs banks,[clarification needed] and filed charges against employers that discriminated against employees.
[6] Promoting respect and appealing to minority employees and customers became significant goals of diversity training starting in the late 1980s.
[7] In the early 2000s, an expansion of diversity training was prompted by a series of high-profile discrimination lawsuits in the financial industry.
According to Harvard University sociologist Frank Dobbin, there is no evidence to indicate that anti-bias training leads to increases in the number of women or people of color in management positions.
[12][13] A 2013 study found that the presence of a diversity program in a workplace made high-status subjects less likely to take discrimination complaints seriously.
Voluntary diversity training participation to advance organization's business goals was associated with increased diversity at the management level; voluntary services resulted in near triple digit increases for black, Hispanic, and Asian men.
[17] The researchers concluded that "while the small number of experimental studies provide encouraging average effects... the effects shrink when the trainings are conducted in real-world workplace settings, when the outcomes are measured at a greater time distance than immediately following the intervention, and, most importantly, when the sample size is large enough to produce reliable results.