For six decades, the federal agency responsible for enforcing workplace anti-discrimination laws has required large private employers to annually report how their workforce breaks down by gender, race, and ethnicity. That requirement may soon be history.
The Trump administration is moving to eliminate the rule, which has obligated tens of thousands of private sector companies to file yearly demographic workforce reports with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC’s Republican majority voted 2-1 on Tuesday to rescind the data collection requirement, kicking off a 30-day public comment period before any final decision is made.
The proposal represents a significant shift in civil rights enforcement — one that would end a practice that has survived through 10 administrations, both Republican and Democratic.
EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, a vocal opponent of diversity and inclusion programs who has encouraged white men to bring forward discrimination complaints, argued that requiring companies to submit the reports could push employers toward discriminatory practices in their efforts to diversify their workforce.
“It may promote racial stereotyping at work, and it may encourage employers to engage in discrimination,” Lucas said at a hearing held before the vote.
Former Democratic EEOC commissioners and civil rights groups have sharply criticized the proposal. They say it will eliminate a crucial instrument for identifying patterns of discrimination and for measuring how women and racial minorities have progressed since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which established the EEOC and banned employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, national origin, and religion.
The EEOC receives more than 88,000 worker complaints annually and has long relied on the demographic data to shape enforcement priorities and support certain investigations.
Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, the only remaining Democrat on the commission since the Trump administration moved to reshape the agency, cast the lone dissenting vote.
“Today, the commission discusses whether to turn back time to a period before the civil rights movement, kneecapping its ability to protect workers,” Kotagal said.
The reporting requirement has been in place since 1966. Under the rule, companies with at least 100 employees — or federal contractors with at least 50 workers — must submit an annual form known as the EEO-1. The form covers 10 job categories ranging from top executive roles down to laborers and service workers, and asks employers to report employee counts by gender as well as by racial and ethnic background, including Hispanic or Latino, Black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian, American Indian or Alaska Native, and those identifying as two or more races.
The data typically covers more than 50 million employees at roughly 73,000 employers across the country.
During the Biden administration, the EEOC launched a public tool allowing users to explore historical workforce demographic trends by industry and job category. The most recent data available covers 2023. The Trump administration collected EEO-1 data for 2024 but has not made it public, and collection of 2025 data would have begun this year.
The data paints a clear picture of who holds power in American workplaces. White men dominate executive and senior management positions, though women and minorities have made some gains — particularly following the rise of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements.
Women make up nearly half the workforce at the surveyed companies but held just 34.5% of executive and senior manager roles in 2023, up from 29.2% a decade earlier. White and Asian women made the fastest gains and by 2023 were no longer underrepresented in senior roles relative to their share of the overall workforce. Black and Hispanic women, however, remained sharply underrepresented despite modest progress.
Among men, Asian men have been proportionally represented in senior roles for years, while Black and Hispanic men remained underrepresented as of 2023. White men, who made up a third of the overall workforce at surveyed companies, held 52.7% of executive and senior management positions — making them the only demographic group that was overrepresented at the top.
Lucas argued that the annual reporting requirements impose “hundreds of millions of dollars” in costs on employers — a burden she said was unjustified without “any allegation, indication, or evidence of discrimination.” The move was also recommended by Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint that has informed many of the Trump administration’s actions.
Former Democratic EEOC commissioners and legal counselors pushed back, saying there is little evidence that companies routinely use the data to implement hiring quotas or race-based decisions.
“This is simply inaccurate and unsupported speculation, at odds with the ways in which this data is actually collected, managed and used,” the former officials said in a statement.
They argued instead that tracking the data encourages companies to proactively review their hiring, promotion, and benefits policies to make sure they are not creating unnecessary barriers.
Kotagal pointed to a recent EEOC investigation of California supermarket chain Vallarta Food Enterprises, in which the agency alleges the grocer failed or refused to recruit, hire, or promote non-Hispanic individuals. EEO-1 data showed that “nearly 100 percent of its employees were Hispanic,” Kotagal noted. “It’s a key tool in our toolbox.”
Kotagal also highlighted a 2024 EEOC report on the technology sector showing women made virtually no gains between 2014 and 2022, and that workers under 40 had actually lost ground. The report also found tech workers were more likely than those in other industries to file age or pay discrimination complaints. That report has since been removed from the EEOC’s website.
While the EEOC is prohibited from publicly releasing individual company EEO-1 forms, it does publish the data in aggregate form. In recent years, a growing number of major companies had voluntarily released their own EEO-1 data in response to shareholder and political pressure to demonstrate transparency around diversity. However, that trend has begun to reverse.
In 2025, 24 companies in the S&P 100 — the largest publicly traded U.S. companies — chose not to disclose their EEO-1 data after having done so the previous year, according to Andrew Jones, principal researcher at The Conference Board Governance & Sustainability Center. Still, 60 S&P 100 companies did release the information.
Separately, fewer companies overall are sharing any demographic metrics. The share of Russell 3,000 companies disclosing data on women in the workforce dropped from 75% in 2024 to 62% in 2025, according to a Conference Board study. Those disclosing metrics on minority representation fell from 30.9% to 26.5%.
Experts say companies will likely continue tracking internal demographic data regardless of whether they are required to file EEO-1 reports, since federal law under Title VII requires employers to maintain records that could be relevant to discrimination investigations, and the EEOC retains the authority to request them.
“What we are generally advising is to stay the course,” said Jennifer Robins, counsel in law firm Saul Ewing’s Labor and Employment Group. “Private litigants, employment discrimination lawsuits are not going away, and this data is helpful to defending oneself.”
The EEOC has itself demanded extensive demographic data from companies as part of several high-profile cases under Lucas, including an investigation into the diversity and inclusion practices of sports giant Nike — which Lucas alleges discriminate against white employees — a lawsuit against the New York Times for allegedly discriminating against a white man passed over for a promotion, and an investigation into alleged antisemitism at the University of Pennsylvania.
Lucas said Tuesday that the EEOC would continue to seek demographic data as part of its own investigations going forward. Kotagal, meanwhile, warned employers that a future EEOC leadership could reinstate the EEO-1 reporting requirement.
Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, said she views the elimination of EEO-1 data collection as part of a broader effort to downplay the prevalence of discrimination against women and racial minorities while amplifying concerns about discrimination against white workers.
“If the chair is moving forward with an agenda that thinks she ought to be focused on men and ought to be focused on white people, my answer is, ‘Well, does the data tell you that?’” Frye said. She added that the data “doesn’t suggest that their top priority ought to be discrimination against white men.”
