DEI Programs Being Shaped in the Courtroom Help Employers

Employers nationwide are facing lawsuits challenging the legality, messaging, and impact of workplace training aimed at dismantling systemic barriers and biases that prevent marginalized groups from fully accessing opportunities in the workplace and beyond.

While most cases are still winding their way through the courts, three recent cases—all involving claims that the employers’ training programs created a hostile work environment—offer important signals for employers trying to balance inclusion goals with legal risk.

Although all are on appeal, the district courts have thus far ruled in favor of the employers, providing practical lessons about next steps and the road ahead.

Recent Cases

In Young v. Colorado Department of Corrections, Joshua Young alleged that his employer’s mandatory equity, diversity, and inclusion training created a hostile work environment by promoting stereotypes about Caucasian people. While the appellate court acknowledged that Young’s objections to the EDI, training were “not unreasonable” and that “race-based training programs” can contribute to hostile workplaces when the training “is combined with ongoing stereotyping and explicit or implicit expectations of discriminatory treatment,” it held that a single training, without an “ongoing presence” in the workplace or any harassment, ridicule, or insults tied to the training, wasn’t sufficiently severe or pervasive.

Undeterred, Young pursued a second lawsuit based on the same training. The district court again dismissed it because Young failed to detail how the single EDI training affected the workplace. Young has again appealed the dismissal.

In Chislett v. New York City Department of Education, Leslie Chislett’s hostile work environment claim—brought under § 1983, which provides another avenue for public employees to sue their employer for discrimination—centered on her employer’s implicit-bias training. According to Chislett, the trainings and the discussions they sparked “focused on ‘whiteness’” and “‘exacerbated’ a workplace that was already ‘racially charged.’”

The district court was unpersuaded. It emphasized that many of the statements Chislett cited as objectionable weren’t part of any training curriculum but instead arose during spontaneous exchanges among her colleagues. The court reasoned that the employer’s decision to facilitate trainings that provided a forum to talk about race did “not mean that, when a particular training result[ed] in[] a heated back-and-forth, the words exchanged [were] pursuant to an official policy of the municipality.”

In Diemert v. City of Seattle, the City of Seattle required its employees to complete two trainings or activities per year related to topics such as race, gender, poverty, Indigenous affairs, and LGBTQ+ rights. Joshua Diemert alleged these sessions prompted comments by his co-workers and supervisors that he found offensive.

While the district court allowed his claim to proceed past a motion to dismiss, it drew a firm line at summary judgment, outright rejecting the notion that employers’ “D.E.I. and anti-discrimination trainings” are “per se unlawful” or “inherently racist.”

The court found that Diemert’s passive exposure to “concepts such as ‘white privilege,’ ‘white fragility,’ implicit bias, or critical race theory” through the city’s trainings didn’t create an objectively hostile work environment. Equating “diversity trainings” with “true workplace environments,” the court warned, “trivializes the freedom protected by [antidiscrimination laws].”

Lessons Learned

These cases offer more than temporary wins for employers; they clarify what courts are—and aren’t—willing to entertain regarding DEI training-related claims. The key takeaways for employers are:

• Discomfort isn’t discrimination.
  Generalized discomfort with or exposure to concepts or discussions such as White privilege, implicit bias, and systemic racism likely won’t constitute a hostile work environment. Plaintiffs must demonstrate repeated, targeted conduct affecting their own employment conditions.
  
• One training doesn’t equal harassment.
  A single training—without evidence of repeated exposure or broader race-based harassment stemming from the training—is likely insufficient to meet the legal threshold for a hostile work environment.
  
• Off-the-cuff remarks by co-workers aren’t official policy.
  Co-workers’ comments sparked by an implicit-bias training, even if offensive and heated, don’t render those comments part of a government employer’s official policy or custom (for a § 1983-based hostile work environment claim).
  
• Courts’ views of Title VII remain consistent.
  In Diemert, the court went further than dismissing the claim—it vigorously defended the role of inclusion work in advancing Title VII’s goals, recognizing that while such trainings might provoke difficult conversations or discomfort, they “play a vital role in preventing workplace discrimination,” as well as furthering “Title VII’s primary goal.”
  
  The court went further still: “These training programs are needed because racial discrimination and inequality are present-day problems, not problems of the distant past. . . . [T]he real threat to equality in the workplace is not the effort to expose and address racial inequalities, but a resistance to doing so.”

Bottom Line

As litigation continues, courts will refine the boundaries of the legal lines. But for now, employers can take comfort in knowing that district courts have been upholding the legality of thoughtfully designed training programs aimed at acknowledging and addressing institutional racism and implicit bias in the workplace.

The key? Focus on quality over box-checking. Inclusive and carefully framed trainings, free from stereotyping or hostility toward any group, aren’t only defensible but essential for building equitable workplaces.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Allegra Lawrence Hardy is co-managing partner at Krevolin & Horst and advises clients on labor and employment issues and crisis management issues.

Lisa Haldar is partner at Krevolin & Horst and represents employers in high-stakes, sensitive workplace disputes and executive employment issues.

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