Twenty-two speakers testified Tuesday at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as the federal agency weighed whether to end a 60-year-old requirement that tens of thousands of private sector employers file annual workforce demographic reports. The proposal would strip away one of the few federal tools used to track who gets hired, promoted, and pushed to the margins. That’s the machinery at work here: a Republican-led agency voting 2-1 last month to stop collecting data that civil rights groups and researchers say helps expose discrimination.
Who Gets to Decide
The hearing lasted more than two hours, but the decision already sits inside a narrow channel of power. The EEOC, which enforces anti-discrimination laws, is taking public comment on the proposal for 30 days, with the period ending Aug. 24. The move is part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overhaul the country’s civil rights enforcement, particularly stamping out diversity and inclusion practices. The agency’s own leadership is pushing the rollback, while workers and advocates are left to argue for the basic ability to see what’s happening inside workplaces.
Since 1966, companies with at least 100 employees, or federal contractors with at least 50 workers, have had to submit an annual EEO-1 report breaking down gender and racial representation across roles from executives to laborers and service workers. That reporting requirement has been a quiet but crucial form of visibility. Without it, the public and researchers lose a federal window into patterns that companies can otherwise bury behind polished statements and compliance language.
Civil rights groups said the data has been essential for uncovering systemic discrimination and tracking the progress of women and minorities since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Amalea Smirniotopoulos, senior policy counsel at the civil rights group Legal Defense Fund, said, “By weakening EEOC enforcement, these changes will harm all workers, but particularly Black workers and other workers of color who continue to face racial discrimination more frequently.” The burden here doesn’t fall on the people making the decision. It lands on workers already dealing with discrimination, then asks them to prove it without the records that help show the pattern.
What the Data Reveals
Researchers described the EEO-1 reports as indispensable. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, co-director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Center for Employment Equity, said he has relied on EEO-1 data for dozens of research articles and two books. He said his research found that workplace discrimination has declined since 1964, but progress has most recently stalled. Without the metrics, he said, “our society will be flying blind into the future.” That’s not a metaphor for comfort. It’s a warning about what happens when institutions decide that measuring inequality is too inconvenient.
Rachel Lee, president and general counsel of Stand with Asian Americans, said the data has been critical for showing that many Asian Americans rarely reach the highest ranks of many companies, even though they make up a large portion of professional roles. “The EEO-1 report is the only federal instrument that exposes what we call the bamboo ceiling,” Lee said. The phrase lands hard because it names a hierarchy that doesn’t announce itself. It just keeps reproducing itself in the upper floors of corporate life.
The conservative case against the reports came dressed as efficiency and legality. Rachel Morrison, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former EEOC attorney, said the data is “inconsistent with equal opportunity law, potentially unconstitutional, unnecessary to enforce anti-discrimination laws, and imposes substantial burdens on both employers and the EEOC that are not outweighed by its marginal benefits.” She also said the EEOC investigates forms of discrimination not captured in the EEO-1 data, including religion and pregnancy-related discrimination, and argued the reports “is not actually necessary for EEOC to enforce Title VII or fulfill its mission.”
What Employers Say They Use It For
Two prominent employer groups pushed back on the agency’s claim that companies misuse the data for racial quotas or other discriminatory practices. David Fortney of the Institute for Workplace Equality, a nonprofit employer association whose members include many of the biggest U.S. companies, said, “Regarding the possible misuse of EEO-1 data, we cannot square that with the experience of our members, and I might add with my personal experience.” Fortney, a former chief legal officer of the Labor Department under President George H.W. Bush, said many employers use the reports to detect and prevent discriminatory practices. He also said the EEOC has not identified any instance of an employer using EEO-1 data for discriminatory purposes. “Presumably after six decades, if the agency had specific instances, it would have called those out,” he said.
Michael Eastman of the Center for Workplace Compliance gave examples of member companies using the data to uncover exclusionary hiring and promotion patterns. One large company, he said, found that an employee referral program at a manufacturing facility consistently produced a narrow applicant pool and “a homogenous hiring pattern at the facility.” Another company found an “unusual pattern” in promotion decisions that suggested managers had misunderstood internal policies to mean race and gender could be considered in promotions. “These examples reflect what many large employers are trying to do when they use demographic data for compliance purposes,” Eastman said.
The hearing put the split in plain view. On one side, civil rights groups and researchers argued that the reports expose discrimination and give workers some leverage against it. On the other, the agency’s conservative leadership and allied critics framed the same data as a burden. The public comment period runs until Aug. 24, but the structure of power is already clear: the people most affected by workplace inequality are being asked to trust the very institutions deciding whether anyone will keep track of it.