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Blake Case
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Today, on Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) voted to issue a proposed rule to eliminate demographic workforce data collection, known as EEO-1, along with other data collection requirements. Equal Pay Today (EPT), a coalition of over 50 national and state-based organizations dedicated to advancing pay equity, denounces this proposal. Based on our collective experience, EPT members know firsthand the critical role that this data collection plays in enforcing federal anti-discrimination law, and we oppose this proposed rule as yet another attempt by the EEOC to undermine compliance with the civil rights protections it was tasked to enforce.
The elimination of EEO-1 data collection would be a blow to all who believe in equal opportunity at work, making it harder to identify discrimination against women, people of color, and other marginalized groups in the workplace.
We cannot change what we cannot measure. The purpose and mission of the EEOC is to enforce federal employment discrimination law by identifying and addressing unjustified disparities. Since 1966, the EEO-1 data collection has supported the EEOC in fulfilling this mission by requiring larger employers to submit employee workforce information to the federal government broken down by race, gender, ethnicity, and job category—a unique and essential dataset on workforce demographics across industries. Rescinding the EEO-1 data collection would eliminate one of the federal government’s most important transparency and accountability tools that provides effective, high-quality, and often the only source of data to track workplace employment composition and demographic diversity and to identify workplace disparities, segregation, and inequities across the nation.
For the past 60 years, the EEOC has been using these data to facilitate civil rights enforcement, guide evidence-based policymaking, and help employers evaluate their own practices. In fact, these data have provided sustained evidence of workplace discrimination based on race and gender that continues to harm women and workers of color in hiring, advancement, and remuneration. Without race and gender workforce data, the federal government, employers, and states will no longer be able to identify hiring, pay, and promotion disparities; job segregation; and other barriers to equal opportunity at work.
The impacts will be profound and far-reaching. Ending this critical data collection will affect millions of workers and be especially harmful for women of color, who experience intersecting forms of race and gender discrimination that result in the widest disparities often only visible through comprehensive data. The EEOC will not only be failing to do its job to enforce our anti-discrimination laws, it will be removing a tool that helps employers fulfill their obligations to identify and address discriminatory trends and that provides important data to states to use in their enforcement efforts.
This proposed erasure of data collection does not take place in a vacuum. It is part of this administration’s broader agenda to reverse over 60 years of progress, taking us back to a time before we had meaningful tools to advance civil rights. This agenda includes a concerted effort to eliminate equal opportunity in the workplace, rescission of affirmative action guidelines, dismantling employer Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, firing independent civil rights enforcement officials, dramatically reducing the EEOC’s national and regional resources, attempting to undermine disparate impact liability, stripping away landmark guidance on workplace harassment, refusing to enforce workplace discrimination laws protecting transgender employees, rescinding its strategic enforcement plan, and removing critical anti-discrimination and equal employment opportunity requirements on companies doing business with the federal government.
Eliminating the data collection will only empower the administration to sweep the harmful impacts of these broader regressions under the rug. Equal Pay Today calls on the EEOC to do its job, abandon its proposed rescission of the EEO-1 data collection, along with the proposed rescission of other data collections, and preserve this crucial tool for enforcing civil rights and advancing workplace equity.
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About Equal Pay Today
The Equal Pay Today campaign, a national coalition of more than 50 state, national, and tribal organizations led by Equal Rights Advocates, continues to push for federal and state solutions that address the full range of drivers of the wage gap, including pay transparency, stronger anti-discrimination enforcement, paid family leave, and an end to poverty wages.