The Federal Government May Stop Collecting the Data That Exposes Workplace Inequality
For six decades, the federal government has required large employers to disclose who works for them and where those employees sit within the organizational hierarchy. Now, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is proposing to eliminate that requirement—potentially making workplace discrimination significantly harder to detect and nearly impossible to prove at scale.
The EEOC voted 2–1 in July to advance a proposal rescinding the EEO-1 report and five related workforce reports. EEO-1 currently requires private employers with at least 100 employees, along with certain federal contractors, to report workers by race, ethnicity, sex and occupational category. The collection covers more than 50 million employees across approximately 73,000 employers, according to an Associated Press analysis. Read the AP report
The commission argues that the reporting requirements are costly to employers, raise constitutional concerns about data collection, and are not necessary to enforce federal anti-discrimination laws. Employers would still be prohibited from discriminating under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and could still be required to produce employment records during an investigation. But this represents a fundamental shift in how discrimination enforcement would work: regulators would first need a reason to open an investigation before obtaining the information that could reveal a broader pattern of inequality. The proactive surveillance built into six decades of data collection would give way to a purely reactive system dependent on individual complaints.
What makes this proposal particularly significant is the evidentiary power of EEO-1 data. The reports give regulators a way to see whether women or workers of color are concentrated in lower-paying jobs, missing from management entirely, or systematically excluded from particular workplaces and industries. Aggregate data also allows researchers and policymakers to measure changes across industries over time—tracking whether progress on diversity is real or illusory. Without this annual snapshot, discrimination does not necessarily disappear; it becomes exponentially more difficult to document, prove, and remedy. A pattern of exclusion that might emerge clearly from five years of comparative data becomes invisible when institutions only respond to individual grievances.
The proposal also arrives at a moment when companies are publishing less diversity information voluntarily. References to gender and race in corporate filings have fallen sharply in recent years, meaning the public and the government could lose visibility simultaneously. The effect would reach far beyond DEI departments and corporate diversity officers. Investors who want to evaluate whether their portfolios include companies delivering equal opportunity would lose a key metric. Employees considering whether to join a company would have fewer tools for assessing workplace culture and inclusion. Civil-rights organizations would lose a primary data source for targeting enforcement efforts. Journalists covering corporate America would have less factual ground to stand on when investigating hiring and promotion patterns.
The shift reveals a central tension in the changing workplace landscape. The government says employers must not discriminate, but it is considering eliminating one of the few systems built to determine whether discrimination is actually happening. Enforcement without measurement leaves workers dependent on individual complaints—often filed only after careers, earnings and opportunities have already been damaged. It also shifts the burden entirely onto workers themselves to identify, document and challenge discrimination, rather than empowering government agencies to spot patterns proactively. For workers in less visible roles, without access to legal counsel, or in industries where power imbalances are acute, this shift can effectively leave discrimination unaddressed.
The public comment period and full regulatory process are still ahead, but the vote signals a significant direction. The question now is whether policymakers, business leaders, and worker advocates will prioritize the administrative convenience of employers over the evidentiary foundation that makes civil rights enforcement possible.
