EEOC moves to dismantle 60-year workforce data system used to detect bias

Vote opens rulemaking to end annual EEO-1 demographic data collection

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Republican majority voted 2–1 last week to begin dismantling the EEO-1 reporting system, a process that could end annual collection of workforce demographic data from large private employers. Two days after the vote, the proposal was entered into the Federal Register, and the commission scheduled a hearing for August 11.

Public comments on the rule are due by August 24, the commission said.

Since 1966, private employers with at least 100 workers and federal contractors with at least 50 employees have been required to submit annual EEO-1 reports, which break down their workforces by race, ethnicity, sex, and ten job categories. The agency estimates that the reports cover more than 50 million people at roughly 73,000 employers each year. Individual company filings are confidential, but the aggregated data has been the primary mechanism allowing investigators to identify patterns of discrimination that no single worker complaint could reveal.

The EEOC estimates that employers collectively spend $273 million annually to comply with the reporting requirement, according to the proposal.

Under the proposed rule, employers would still be required to maintain internal records of hiring, promotion, pay, and termination decisions. However, without the standardized demographic categories now reported to the agency, investigators would lose the ability to compare those decisions across groups without first filing a subpoena. The commission could still demand demographic information after a charge or lawsuit is initiated, but would no longer assume that employers had collected the same information in a uniform format.

EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, a Trump appointee, has described diversity programs as producing “systemic discrimination” primarily against white men. In December, Lucas invited white men who believed they had suffered race or sex discrimination to file complaints with the agency.

In May 2024, Lucas issued a commissioner’s charge against Nike, opening an investigation into alleged bias against white employees at the company. The charge itself cited Nike’s publicly disclosed EEO-1 data — data generated by the very reporting requirement the commission now proposes to eliminate, the Guardian reported. The investigation remains open.

The most recent published national EEO-1 data, from 2023, showed that white men held 52.7% of executive and senior management jobs while representing about a third of the surveyed workforce, an Associated Press analysis found. The data indicated white men were the only demographic group overrepresented at that level.