> "Does the risk of a discrimination lawsuit cause managers to shy away from protected classes?"

I do not understand. A company with a pattern of shying away from a protected class is in violation of the law, and risks a lawsuit. How does a manager know which is more likely to incur a lawsuit?

> "or due to the general change in society that prompted the laws in the first place"

The laws themselves could also have changed, or accelerated the change, in society.

> we don't know if it's due to the laws

There can be, because state laws may have additional protected classes, up to and including California's Unruh Civil Rights Act, which is I believe the broadest such law in the US.

However, as the minimum wage law issue points out, even when such studies are done, the results are still contentious. This is why I asked you to describe what would be sufficiently good evidence before I start looking. If it's unrealistically high, then there's no point in me wasting my time.

This is also why I asked you to point to laws regarding social change where you think the laws actually made a difference and have a empirical support. That lets me know where you are coming from. If you can't point to any laws with sufficient empirical evidence, then I'm not likely to find something which satisfies you.

> "many offices are trained on the law, but then shortly afterwards you say that most employers don't know the relevant laws"

Yes, I can see the apparent contradiction. It's a matter of the depth of required knowledge and numbers. For an employer to work around the legal prohibitions requires a high level of understanding of the laws. Most supervisors do not have this knowledge. While for an employee to protest an illegal employer action requires a much lower understanding.

When I say "many offices", I mean numbers like 10% have good training (eg, a friend working for the state government had really good EEOC training), more (say, 40%) have mediocre training of perhaps a couple of hours by HR when starting with the job, and the rest have none other than a poster in the breakroom describing their rights. These numbers are pulled out of my ass, but roughly equal to my understanding.

This means that most supervisors don't have real knowledge of EEOC laws, other than the few hours they might have gotten years previous from HR when they started as an employee.

Suppose supervisor S fires employee E due to an illegally discriminatory reason. S might talk to a couple of people before making the decision. E, on the other hand, likely complains to friends and family about the decision. Suppose 10% of the people know the action might be illegal. If 3 people were involved in the decision, then there's a 75% chance they don't know it might be illegal. If S talks to 9 friends, then there's only a 33% chance that none of them realize it's likely illegal.

> "[ADF] cultural sensitivity training"

How is this relevant? Cultural sensitivity training is not the same as anti-discrimination laws. Australia is not the US. People can have anti-X sentiment, and even increased anti-X sentiment, and still employ people who are X in a non-discriminatory fashion.

Are you only pointing out that it's possible to carry out studies on people regarding questions of social policy?

Also, the introduction to that non-peer-reviewed paper says "Both the Evaluation Board of the Australian Army Journal, which reviews these articles, and my staff, have a number of opposing views on this article’s content and its reflection on the lived experience of Army values. ... This article is one view, of one cross section of our people, undertaking one component of our preparation for operations". Angus J Campbell and others don't seem to think the empirical evidence given is persuasive.

> "people who are truly discriminatory"

I do not understand what "truly discriminatory" means. We have plenty of lawsuits where companies have been found guilt of being discriminatory, so that's about as true as it gets.

It feels like you have another definition which is far higher than, say, an Archie Bunker level of general bigotry, and reaching more the levels of a villain in a melodrama. Are you really saying that only people who have successfully worked around the law are truly discriminatory? Because that sounds like a rather meaningless label for policy decisions.

In practice I imagine there are people who want to work around the law, but the cost (mental and financial) of figuring out how to do so is too high. That makes them practically non-discriminatory even if their true self would like to be discriminatory.

You again talk about "people who are rational". Do you have empirical evidence that people are rational? The empirical evidence from behavior psychology, which I alluded to earlier, shows that people are not rational. Do you not believe in those results?

If people are not rational, then your argument goes out the window.