How DEI is harassing yoga Moral panic makes bad policy

A man named Javier urgently needs my help. He’s just hired a new associate named Raphael at the company where he works as a manager. Raphael is openly gay, which Javier is fine with, he quickly assures me — but some of his colleagues are not. Another employee, Tina, has been shunning Raphael at work and calling him “queer” behind his back. Javier is beside himself: what should he say? What should he do?

Fortunately for Javier, he doesn’t exist. He’s a figment, a spectre, a ghost in the machine of the diversity-industrial complex — and a character in the anti-harassment and discrimination training that I had to complete last month. This training, accessed remotely via an online portal, is an annual requirement of my part-time job as a yoga instructor. Designed by a third-party contractor, it covers all manner of workplace sins: sexual harassment, discrimination, plus various isms and phobias.

It also takes two hours — as in, 120 minutes — as required by state law. In 2019, Connecticut governor Ned Lamont put his signature on two pieces of legislation known, collectively, as the Time’s Up Act. Touted as a “proactive approach” to combating workplace sexual harassment, the law was inspired by the #MeToo movement (along with, presumably, the movement’s fancy Hollywood cousin, Time’s Up.) Among its accomplishments was a mandate that the employees of any company comprising three or more people must complete two hours of sexual harassment training, no exceptions.

The above information is contained in the training itself, for what I’ve concluded must be two reasons. The first is that the authors of the training want you to know exactly who is responsible for making you sit through an interminable lesson in why you shouldn’t refer to your co-workers using homophobic slurs. The second reason is that, man, two hours is a lot of time to fill.

To be fair to the creators of the training module, they have done their best to make it interesting (more on that later). But, having been employed at the same company since before the passage of the Time’s Up Act, I’ve noticed something intriguing: all this content is virtually unchanged from what it was several years ago, when the law required just one hour of DEI compliance training. It’s not just the same concepts, but the same actors, the same scripted scenarios. Is this a two-hour training? No: it’s a one-hour training in a two-hour bag padded out with a bunch of foam packing peanuts. Having noticed this DEI twist on shrinkflation, it’s impossible to unsee. The sheer volume of gimmicks, whereby the training designers manage to convey the same information in double the time, would be awe-inspiring if it weren’t so irritating.

Each hypothetical harassment scenario is described four times: in a short text essay, then in a first-person video, then as a word problem followed by a multiple-choice quiz, and then, finally, in a post-quiz recap that reiterates the same information all over again. A segment about the professional hazards of social media is similarly laborious, making you click through six panels of an alleged confession by “Sarah”, who wrote a social-media post with a “discriminatory tone” before boarding a long flight, only to find herself dogpiled when she landed. (It’s hard to know what’s worse: the time-consuming structure, or the blatant, uncompensated rip-off of the Justine Sacco story, as if that woman hasn’t suffered enough.) And in the section detailing the content of the Time’s Up Act, the legislation is broken into eight bullet points, each hidden behind an interactive drop-down menu that you have to physically click on three times — once to open it, once to close it, and once to advance to the next one.

Have you ever been stuck in the supermarket checkout line with a cashier who insists on breaking a bunch of bananas into eight individual bananas and laboriously scanning them one at a time? It’s like that, but worse, because you can’t eat the sexual harassment training. But if the form of the training is categorically absurd, what it attempts to teach isn’t much better. At best, these concepts are common sense, a reiteration of the basic norms of human interaction that most of us learned in preschool. Don’t exclude, don’t name-call, don’t touch people who ask you not to touch them — and no, Javier, I do not think you should tell Raphael to “stop being such a drama queen” about his co-worker referring to him with a homophobic slur.

At worst, though, this training seems like it was designed in a lab to replace a functional, high-trust workplace with one in which employees are both in constant terror of giving offence and primed for any opportunity to take it: ratting each other out to HR for failing to use a co-worker’s preferred pronouns, hand-wringing about whether it’s harassment to invite a gluten-intolerant colleague out for a pint, asking formal consent to high-five. And I particularly have questions about the instructional video on gender identity, featuring a montage of daring gender nonconformists such as… a man holding a baby and a woman lifting weights. Should we really be telling people who literally work at a gym that every woman in the weight room is gender nonconforming? Isn’t this crude and sexist stereotyping the opposite of inclusive? Excuse me, sir, but don’t you know that holding your infant child is for sissy girls? A real man would drop-kick that baby through the goalposts at the Big House while shotgunning two beers at once!

It’s strange to realise that all of this has been done in the name of the #MeToo movement, whose original purpose was to raise awareness of how women continue to be held back in the workplace on the basis of sex. It wasn’t just harassment or assault; it was pregnancy discrimination, gendered workplace expectations, the way the inescapable presence of sexuality loomed in the background of our professional lives. A woman who is expected to sleep with her boss in order to advance professionally is in a terrible position, but so too is the woman at the same company whose boss doesn’t want to sleep with her, and whose prospects suffer as a result.

But insofar as this problem can be solved, it’s not by ensnaring would-be perpetrators in a web of red tape; it’s through the slow and deliberate work of effecting cultural change, and the immediate improvement of support for the victims of discrimination. On this front, I’ll grant that the Time’s Up Act isn’t entirely useless. Those who wish to file a workplace harassment complaint now have up to 300 days to do so (it used to be 180 days). And while employers were already prohibited from retaliating against complainants, it is now also illegal to change the terms of a person’s employment after they make a harassment complaint — by relocating that person, for instance — without their consent.

But mostly, this legislation is typical of the extreme do-somethingism that politicians become afflicted with whenever a lot of Americans — and particularly the subset of Americans who walk the red carpet at the Oscars wearing $85,000 gowns — are up in arms. From the War on Drugs to the Patriot Act, moral panics tend to make for bad policy. And in this case, the clarion call of “There oughta be a law!” becomes complicated by the fact that there already is one: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 established a nationwide edict against workplace discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex, one which has been consistently upheld by both the courts and a cultural consensus that women should be able to do their jobs unmolested.

The problem is, there’s a difference between making a thing illegal and writing that thing out of existence; much like thieves, murderers and fake Nigerian prince email scammers, sexual harassers are still out there, harassing people sexually. But rather than admitting the limits of their power to eradicate the world’s ills through bureaucracy, politicians instead conclude that the existing law making workplace harassment illegal doesn’t make it illegal enough. It needs more bells and whistles! More rules and regulations! We need a cursed matryoshka doll of policies within policies within policies, each more unwieldy and elaborate than the last.

This is where the mandatory training comes in — a training which I would estimate prevented exactly zero incidents of harassment, unless the would-be offender happened to be stuck completing it at precisely the day and time when he would have otherwise been harassing someone. The Weinstein-esque perpetrators at whom the #MeToo movement took aim are not going to be deterred by an extra hour of anti-harassment training, if they even have to take it (most, I would imagine, are getting an assistant to complete it for them). This is what makes the Time’s Up Act and its ilk so toothless, and frankly so offensive: it pretends to address the abuses of powerful men by condescending to and wasting the time of ordinary working people.

It’s worth noting that employees like me are often not compensated for this training, and it goes without saying that we are not meant to model our actual behaviour on it. It’s not just that being maximally sensitive to microaggressions is incompatible with a job that requires you to stand at the front of a crowded room, in spandex, lunging and squatting while two dozen people stare at your body in order to mirror your movements. It’s that fitness is a service industry, one in which tolerating people’s idiosyncrasies, oddities and low-key improprieties is part of the job.

Of course, if I were sexually harassed at work, I’m sure my employer would protect me to whatever extent required by law — but only because it’s required by law, much like the two-hour harassment training, which I’m equally sure the company would point to as evidence that they ought not be held responsible for the bad acts that happen under their watch. We gave them the training! It’s not our fault! Ultimately, these measures are little more than exercises in box-checking compliance, a way for corporations to dodge lawsuits and displace the accountability for workplace harassment onto someone else’s shoulders.

This was never more apparent than in the moment after I finished the final quiz, when I was greeted with a pop-up and a countdown clock: “This course requires you to spend a certain amount of time on your learning experience,” it read. “Please go back and review the course material until you’ve reached the time limit.” In spite of everything, I had finished too quickly; I would need to stare aimlessly at the module for another 30 minutes to fulfil my compliance. Time’s Up, indeed.

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