Mandating change: The impact of court-ordered policy changes on managerial diversity (Hirsh & Cha, 2017)

Diversity training and education policies are a popular method of reducing bias in the workplace, due to its ability to make decision makers aware of their conscious and unconscious biases. Although the authors did not provide details for each individual case that required the intervention, diversity training was summarized as social psychological research-based programs to reduce the sex and race biases of employees that allow for workplace discrimination to occur. 

The study used a nonexperimental design to estimate the impact of court-mandated diversity training on the representation of white women, black women, and black men employed in managerial positions. Study authors used data from high-profile employment discrimination lawsuits settled from 1996 through 2008 that required the firm to implement diversity training in the court settlements or verdicts for each subsidiary establishment.  The authors measured managerial diversity one year following the lawsuit settlement or verdict. In addition to controlling for unobservable characteristics, the statistical model controlled for several lawsuit and organizational characteristics such as monetary awards for plaintiffs, the number of plaintiffs and lawsuits that each firm faced, establishment size, firm size, the percent of white male managers, within-establishment labor supply and local labor market, and the year.