Stopping Pseudo Diversity in its Tracks

Last week I wrote about the all day class on "men and woman working together" I was subjected to.  Well, I wasn't the only one who felt that the material did little to get beyond the promotion of poor stereotypes.  My post, and a co-workers in person complaints, caused our managers to re-evaluate the value of this particular offering.  Long story short... the class was halted after a discussion with HR before the last third of our team (and eventually all of Devdiv) was forced to take it! 

Having been a team lead at Microsoft I've been to some great trainings on Diversity that focused more on teaching general techniques for working well with multiple thinking styles and understanding the different filters that everyone sees the world through.  My push was to have this, more generalized, diversity training rolled out instead.  I think that we're on our way toward this as a replacement to the stereo-typed views of gender relationships.