Basic Trope: A program at work, school, a place of worship, etc. intended to teach political correctness.
- Straight: Bob is sent to a training seminar at work to teach (the men in particular) how to stop sexual harassment in the workplace (and hopefully out of it as well).
- Exaggerated: The class is taught by a Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher, who teaches them Newspeak, and makes them wear formless gray robes in order to enforce equality. The students are taught how to resolve conflicts by talking, and when Bob unwraps a BLT sandwich, the teacher takes it away and replaces it with (organic) salad, saying that meat is murder. Jokes of any kind are not allowed, not even knock-knock jokes.
- Downplayed: HR circulates a memo reminding employees about sexual harassment in the workplace.
- Justified:
- Inverted:
- A class is conducted on how best to "compliment" the opposite sex at work by doing things like touching, asking for sexual favors (with or without using blackmail), Sleeping with the Boss, etc.
- Alice has just started a job in construction. After she cries because of a foreman's tendency to yell at employees and tell dirty jokes, her fellow tradeswomen coach her on how to not take things so personally.
- Subverted: Bob goes in for a regular meeting.
- Double Subverted: But the meeting is concluded with a seminar on sexual harassment.
- Parodied: In an attempt to revamp the company's image, Trope Co. Inc. becomes the epitome of Political Overcorrectness.
- Zig Zagged: Only some employees (namely, those with Straw Misogynist tendencies) get this training. The rest don't.
- Averted: No such classes are conducted. In fact, workplace harassment isn't even mentioned in passing. Perhaps it's a setting where there's No Such Thing as H.R., and/or sexual harassment was called "boys will be boys."
- Enforced:
- Very Special Episode
- One of the writers used to work for a consulting firm that did a lot of compliance training, sensitivity training being one of their main services, and also saw some absolute shitshow workplaces that hired them for all the wrong reasons and effectively expected them to fix their toxic and abusive cultures for them.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: Bob cracks a sexist joke at the water cooler, which Alice doesn't find funny. She complains to HR, and Bob is sent to this sort of training program.
- Exploited: Alice hates Bob, and while she'd be happier if he got fired, she'll settle for him being in sensitivity training all day.
- Defied:
- The HR person thinks Bob's remark was actually pretty funny, and Alice's complaint either gets tossed out, or Bob just gets a warning.
- Bob manages to find himself some important busy work to get himself out of going to the seminar.
- Discussed: "Okay, let me get this straight. You're the subject of a hostile work environment claim, and you just told me that you haven't updated your workplace harassment policies in eight years, haven't had a sensitivity seminar in almost two, and your own HR department shuffled the person making the claim off to a different department, did not fire the person accused of harassing them and barely even gave them a slap on the wrist, and then tried to make the person making the claim sign a forced arbitration clause after they tried to escalate the claim, then blatantly papered their file with three writeups in two weeks after years of nothing. This is, in my almost twenty years of practicing employment law, the biggest mess I have ever seen. I can tell you that your best, and, really, only option at this point is to settle out of court with what will probably be a mid-six-figure sum, because literally any other option is going to cost you way more than that."
- Conversed: "Can we just fire Tropers LLC as a client? I am SO. FUCKING. SICK. OF. THESE. FUCKING. PEOPLE!" "I take it the sensitivity training session you gave today didn't go so hot?" "Don't even get me started. They DO NOT GET IT. They think that I'm their HR fairy godmother who is going to wave my magic wand and fix their awful good ol' boys culture and make them impervious to future lawsuits, like bitch it doesn't work like that, you have to actually do the work yourself to make your workplace not be a cesspool." "I should have known. When we were discussing the training, they acknowledged that they had had some problems in the past, but passed off more recent issues as 'disgruntled employees making false claims because our spotty past makes them think they can shake us down for a quick payout or get out of disclipline'. I'm admittedly kind of removed from it, but based on my interactions with them, I'm not shocked."
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