Twenty-two speakers testified Tuesday at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against a proposal that would dismantle six decades of workplace demographic reporting—a tool that civil rights advocates say is essential to exposing discrimination that would otherwise remain hidden.
The EEOC's Republican-led board voted 2-1 last month to stop collecting the EEO-1 report, an annual filing required since 1966 from companies with at least 100 employees and federal contractors with at least 50 workers. The data breaks down gender and racial representation across job categories, from executives to service workers. The agency argues the requirement burdens employers and may encourage discriminatory hiring to meet diversity goals.
But the evidence presented at Tuesday's hearing—which lasted more than two hours—painted a starkly different picture. Researchers, civil rights organizations, and even major employers described how the data has been instrumental in detecting and correcting systemic exclusion that would otherwise go undetected.
The Tools That Expose Hidden Discrimination
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, co-director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Center for Employment Equity, testified that he's relied on EEO-1 data for dozens of research articles and two books. His work has found that while workplace discrimination declined after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, progress has stalled in recent years. "Without EEO-1 metrics, our society will be flying blind into the future," he said.
Rachel Lee, president and general counsel of Stand with Asian Americans, described how the data exposed what her organization calls the "bamboo ceiling"—the reality that many Asian Americans rarely reach senior positions despite comprising a large portion of professional workforces. "The EEO-1 report is the only federal instrument that exposes" this pattern, Lee testified.
Amalea Smirniotopoulos, senior policy counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, warned of the broader consequences. "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," she said.
How Companies Actually Use the Data
The administration's claim that employers misuse the data to discriminate faced direct pushback from the business community itself. David Fortney of the Institute for Workplace Equality—whose members include many of the largest U.S. companies—said his organization's members don't use EEO-1 data to establish racial quotas. "The EEOC has not identified any instance of an employer using EEO-1 data for discriminatory purposes," Fortney noted. "Presumably after six decades, if the agency had specific instances, it would have called those out."
Michael Eastman of the Center for Workplace Compliance described concrete examples of how member companies have used the data to correct discrimination. One large manufacturer discovered that an employee referral program was producing "a homogenous hiring pattern." Another found an "unusual pattern" in promotions that suggested managers had misunderstood internal policies. These companies used the data to fix problems—not create them.
Conservative advocates offered a different framing. Rachel Morrison, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former EEOC attorney, argued the data is "inconsistent with equal opportunity law" and "potentially unconstitutional." She noted that the EEOC investigates forms of discrimination not captured in EEO-1 reports, like religion and pregnancy discrimination, suggesting the data isn't necessary for enforcement.
The Stakes of Going Blind
The proposal is currently subject to a 30-day public commentary period ending Aug. 24. It represents a key element of the Trump administration's broader effort to overhaul civil rights enforcement, particularly by eliminating diversity and inclusion practices.
Six speakers at Tuesday's hearing supported ending the requirement. But the overwhelming majority—and notably, prominent employers—argued that removing this transparency tool would make it impossible to detect discrimination that happens quietly, systematically, and without obvious intent. When companies can't measure their own workforce composition, patterns of exclusion don't disappear. They just become invisible.
Why This Matters:
Workplace discrimination doesn't announce itself. It hides in hiring practices, promotion decisions, and referral networks that appear neutral on the surface but produce starkly unequal outcomes. For 60 years, the EEO-1 report has been the primary mechanism for exposing these patterns—allowing researchers to track progress, companies to identify their own blind spots, and civil rights agencies to investigate violations. Eliminating this data collection doesn't eliminate discrimination; it eliminates accountability. Workers and communities that have historically faced workplace discrimination would lose the only federal tool designed to measure whether that discrimination persists. The proposal affects enforcement of laws passed more than six decades ago that were supposed to guarantee equal opportunity. Without data, there's no way to know if those guarantees are being honored.