The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is proposing to end a 60-year-old requirement for private sector employers to submit annual workforce demographic reports. The agency's Republican majority voted 2-1 to rescind the data collection requirement, initiating a 30-day public comment period before final approval.
This proposal, submitted for public review, marks a significant shift in civil rights enforcement under the Trump administration, ending a practice that has been in place through multiple presidencies. The EEO-1 form, required since 1966 for companies with at least 100 employees and federal contractors with at least 50 workers, collects data on the gender, race, and ethnicity of employees across 10 job categories, from executive roles to laborers. Historically, this data has covered over 50 million employees and 73,000 employers nationwide.
EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, who has been critical of diversity and inclusion initiatives, argued that the annual reporting requirement could inadvertently encourage discriminatory practices as companies strive to meet demographic targets. "It may promote racial stereotyping at work, and it may encourage employers to engage in discrimination," Lucas stated during a hearing before the vote.
Conversely, former Democratic EEOC commissioners and civil rights organizations have condemned the proposal, asserting that it removes a vital tool for identifying patterns of discrimination and tracking the progress of women and racial minorities in the workforce since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, the sole Democrat on the commission, voted against the proposal, stating, "Today, the commission discusses whether to turn back time to a period before the civil rights movement, kneecapping its ability to protect workers."
Data collected through the EEO-1 form has historically guided the EEOC's enforcement priorities and investigations. While the form prohibits the public release of individual company data, aggregate information has been made available, including through an interactive tool launched by the EEOC during the Biden administration. Recent data from 2023 indicated that white men hold a disproportionate number of executive and senior manager roles, although women and minorities have shown progress in these positions in recent years.
In 2023, women held 34.5% of executive and senior manager roles, an increase from 29.2% a decade prior. White and Asian women made the most significant gains, with Black and Hispanic women remaining underrepresented in these top positions. Asian men were proportionally represented, while Black and Hispanic men were underrepresented. White men, comprising a third of the overall workforce surveyed, held 52.7% of executive and senior management roles.
Lucas also cited the considerable cost imposed on employers by the annual reporting, estimating it in the "hundreds of millions of dollars," which she deemed unnecessary without evidence of discrimination. The move aligns with recommendations from Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint developed by the Heritage Foundation.
Critics, including former Democratic EEOC officials, have countered that there is little evidence of companies using employment data for quotas or discriminatory hiring. They argue that tracking such data encourages proactive examination of hiring and promotion policies. Despite the potential end of mandatory EEO-1 submissions, employers are still likely to retain demographic data due to record-keeping requirements under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which are pertinent to any discrimination investigation and can be requested by the EEOC.
EEOC investigations, including one into Nike's diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, have previously demanded extensive demographic data. Both Lucas and Kotagal acknowledged that future leadership at the EEOC could reinstate the EEO-1 data collection requirement.