EEOC advances plan to end 60-year workforce demographic data collection

Agency used the data in $5.5M trucking discrimination settlement

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has proposed ending its EEO-1 demographic data collection, a 60-year-old reporting requirement that companies use to disclose workforce composition by race, ethnicity, sex, and job title. The majority-Republican commission is expected to vote on the proposal this fall.

The proposal was issued over the summer and comes as the Trump administration works to roll back federal diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and to terminate or alter decades’ worth of federal datasets. Without the data, former EEOC officials and civil rights advocates said, the agency will struggle to identify widespread discrimination in hiring and promotions.

EEOC Commissioner Andrea Lucas, who was appointed by Trump, told a July hearing that the demographic data collection is unconstitutional, burdensome on employers, encourages DEI programs, and incentivizes discrimination against white workers. “I believe the Commission’s proposed rescission of the annual reporting requirement will not hinder the Commission’s law enforcement work to investigate specific charges of discrimination,” Lucas said in a statement. The agency did not respond to requests for comment about how its priorities have shifted under the second Trump administration.

The data has been collected since the EEOC’s creation under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and is one of the first tools agency investigators use to decide where to direct limited enforcement resources. The EEOC receives nearly 90,000 discrimination complaints each year, and its staffing is at its lowest point in 45 years, according to the report.

“If you see a particular employer really stands out because they have fewer women in management or fewer Black people in management compared to their peer employers in the same industry or in the same area, it’s more likely the case that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and there’s something going on here,” said Karla Gilbride, a former general counsel at the EEOC who is now a deputy director of litigation for the Disability Rights program at the ACLU.

The data’s role in enforcement is visible in a recent case against Central Transport, a large national trucking company. In 2016, Cassandra Coleman, a truck driver with 21 years of experience and a spotless driving record, applied for a job at the company’s Phoenix, Arizona, office. A male employee discouraged her from applying, telling her “it’s not going to do you any good,” according to the complaint. Coleman never received a callback, and Central Transport hired 10 male truck drivers around the same time.

Three years later, Coleman applied at the company’s Portland, Oregon, office. She was invited for an interview, but when she arrived, the company told her the position had been filled. The EEOC found that female applicants at more than 25 Central Transport locations nationwide had their applications thrown away, lost, or passed over for less-qualified male candidates. Using EEO-1 data to show a consistent statistical disparity between female applicants and hires, the agency alleged in a class-action lawsuit that Central Transport had passed over qualified women for more than 10 years. In May 2026, the company agreed to pay $5.5 million and enter a consent decree to reform its hiring process.

The proposed elimination of EEO-1 data follows a series of other changes at the EEOC since Trump returned to office in January 2025. One of his first acts in the second term was to fire two of the three Democratic EEOC commissioners before the end of their five-year terms, an unprecedented move that gave Republicans a 2-1 majority on the commission. The agency has since rolled back guidelines protecting workers from national origin discrimination, deleted anti-harassment guidance that included using the wrong pronouns as harassment, dropped all active cases involving trans or nonbinary workers, and announced its intent to revise the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act to exclude people who need accommodations for abortions and other pregnancy-related conditions.

In June, the EEOC withdrew its 10-year strategic enforcement plan and adopted a new national plan naming four priorities: combating “DEI-related discrimination” and “anti-American national origin discrimination,” and protecting “workers’ rights to express the binary nature of sex” and “religious liberty rights.”

“The data is not going to show that white people or men are disproportionately not represented in management positions, and so they have no interest in collecting that,” said Chai Feldblum, an EEOC commissioner from 2010 to 2019 who is now president of the EEO Leaders, a watchdog group of former agency staff.

The EEO-1 data is the only data collection of its kind, providing insights into trends such as the percentage of women in senior-level executive positions in US companies and the racial makeup of a company’s lowest-paid staff. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, a founding director of the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said he and other researchers have had data-sharing agreements with the EEOC since the late 1990s. Last summer, the EEOC abruptly terminated all of those agreements and stopped all communication with the researchers, Tomaskovic-Devey said. The aggregate data is also made public, with individual employers not identifiable, and has served as a key source for researchers and civil rights advocates evaluating the impact of diversity and workforce policies.

In December, Lucas posted a video on X encouraging white men to file discrimination complaints with the EEOC, asking: “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws.” The agency has also opened investigations into Nike’s corporate diversity practices, sent letters to 20 law firms requesting information about their DEI practices, and sued the New York Times for allegedly discriminating against a white male employee who was not promoted.

“Getting rid of this data collection is part of a larger effort to weaponize civil rights enforcement and flip the laws that we have on their head,” said Katie Sandson, senior counsel on the education and workplace justice team at the National Women’s Law Center, which is suing the EEOC for refusing to enforce workplace protections for trans employees.

“It’s not a coincidence that the EEOC is trying to eliminate data collection that documents potential discrimination,” said Maya Raghu, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law’s director of the Protecting and Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative. “It’s all part of a bigger pattern of this administration weaponizing our civil rights agencies, both to undermine civil rights protections and enforcement, but also to advance this anti-diversity, equity and inclusion agenda.”