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I think we can all agree that it wouldn't hurt Donald Trump if he signed up for a little diversity training. (Bonus question: Are employees of the White House required to do diversity training as the rest of corporate America?)

I mean, telling people of color, who happen to be American citizens and members of Congress, to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” is such a tired trope. I can't even tell you how many times I was told to go back to China, Japan or Viet Nam when I was growing up in Texas during the '70s. Shouldn't the president of the United States be more sophisticated than those 10-year-old bullies at the Red Elementary School from the Dark Ages?

Trump might be totally incorrigible, but diversity training generally isn't working for others in the workforce either, according to research by faculty at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. (The study involved over 3,000 employees from large global organizations who participated in online diversity training, measuring their attitudes toward women and racial minorities.)

“We found very little evidence that diversity training affected the behavior of men or white employees overall—the two groups who typically hold the most power in organizations and are often the primary targets of these interventions,” write the authors of the study in the Harvard Business Review.

Repeat after me: It didn't change the behavior of those in power.

But before I get accused of only focusing on the negative, let me give you the positive results from diversity training:

• Bias training helped change the attitudes of those who had been the least supportive of women. After training, this group became “more likely to acknowledge discrimination against women, express support for policies designed to help women, and acknowledge their own racial and gender biases.”
• Bias training prompted junior women to seek out mentorship and be more proactive about their careers. The researchers speculate that the training made women more conscious of bias in the workplace. Or that “the institutional effort to promote inclusivity led these women to trust that it was safe to advocate for themselves.”
• Gender bias training made employees more conscious of bias faced by racial minorities. “It appears that helping people recognize biases towards one marginalized group of people can have positive spillover effects on their attitudes and behaviors towards other marginalized groups.”

How wonderful and touching that so many attitudes were changed through training. But so what?

Again, the bottom line: Training didn't change behavior. And that means diverse and female employees are still not getting what they need to advance, such as mentorships or recognition. For instance, three weeks after the training, employees were asked to nominate coworkers they'd like to meet for coffee. Here's what the researchers say about the result: “Contrary to our expectations, the training didn't prompt men to nominate more women, nor did it lead senior women to nominate more junior women.”

Sadly, this all also reconfirms research conducted by the legal industry. In a study by the American Bar Association's commission on women and the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, the finding was that the profession's gender equality and diversity efforts over the last three decades have been largely useless and a waste of time.

Edward Chang, a doctoral candidate who worked on the Wharton study, offers no comfort that diversity training in law firms would be better. “We don't really have any reason to expect that the effects of training would be different among lawyers than the effects we found in our research.”

But Chang tells me that management support can tip the balance. “The more supportive you are of diversity prior to training, the more likely you are to change your behavior as a result of training; the less supportive you are, the more likely you are to change your attitudes but not your behaviors.”

So there we are again: We won't see a meaningful spike in the percentage of women or minorities in the legal profession or anywhere else controlled by white, middle-aged men unless those white, middle-aged men make it a true top priority.

Not to be a constant naysayer, but I'm not seein' it.

Contact Vivia Chen at [email protected]. On Twitter: @lawcareerist.