Federal civil rights agency moves to stop requiring demographic data collection after 60 years

NEW YORK (AP) — How many women hold executive positions at major American companies? What is the racial and ethnic breakdown of those roles? What is the gender and racial breakdown of the lowest paid roles in those companies?

He watches: Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is abandoning its main tool for combating workplace discrimination

The Trump administration is making it harder for the public to know, moving aside to ignore a 60-year-old requirement that tens of thousands of private-sector employers file workforce demographic reports each year with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency responsible for enforcing workplace anti-discrimination laws.

The Republican majority on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted 2-1 Tuesday to eliminate the data collection requirement, submitting the proposal to a 30-day public comment period before final approval. The proposal is a quiet but profound push in President Donald Trump’s reshaping of civil rights enforcement, ending a practice that has persisted through 10 Republican and Democratic administrations.

Requiring companies to submit annual demographic reports risks encouraging companies to justify discriminatory practices to diversify their workforce, said EEOC Chairman Andrea Lucas, an outspoken critic of diversity and inclusion practices who has urged white men to come forward with discrimination complaints.

“It may reinforce racial stereotypes at work, and it may encourage employers to engage in discrimination,” Lucas said during a hearing before the vote.

Former Democratic commissioners of the EEOC and civil rights organizations have denounced the proposal, saying it would deprive the agency of a critical tool for detecting patterns of discrimination and tracking the performance of women and racial minorities since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which established the EEOC and prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, national origin and religion.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which receives more than 88,000 complaints from workers each year, has historically used the data to guide its enforcement priorities and guide some of its investigations.

Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, the only Democrat remaining on the EEOC since Trump moved to wrest control of the agency, voted against the proposal.

“Today, the committee is debating whether to turn back time to the period before the civil rights movement, hindering its ability to protect workers,” Kotagal said.

Here’s what to know about the reporting requirements and the proposed termination:

How the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission collected the data

Since 1966, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has required companies with at least 100 employees, or federal contractors with at least 50 workers, to file a form called the EEO-1 each year.

The model, which has evolved over time, identifies 10 job categories from “executives/senior officials and managers” to “laborers” and “service workers.” Employers are required to report the number of male and female employees in each job category, as well as the number of workers of different races and ethnicities.

The data typically covers more than 50 million employees and 73,000 employers nationwide.

A look at gender and race in the private sector

During the Biden administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission launched an interactive tool that allows the public to explore historical demographic metrics across industries and job categories. The most recent data is from 2023. Under the Trump administration, the EEOC last collected EE0-1 data for 2024 but did not disclose it publicly. The 2025 collection began this year.

Data shows that white men dominate executive and senior manager roles at private companies, although women and minorities have made inroads, especially in the years following the #MeToo and Black Lives Matters movements.

Women are still underrepresented in senior corporate positions. While they make up nearly half of the workforce at companies surveyed, women held just 34.5% of CEO and senior manager positions in 2023. That was up from 29.2% a decade ago.

White and Asian women have made the fastest gains, and by 2023, they will no longer be underrepresented in senior roles relative to their numbers in the overall workforce. In contrast, Black and Latina women remained sharply underrepresented in executive and senior manager roles despite making modest gains.

Asian men have been disproportionately represented in senior roles for years, while Black and Hispanic men remain underrepresented in 2023.

Among those demographic groups, only one group was overrepresented in senior roles: white men, who made up a third of the total workforce at the companies surveyed, but held 52.7% of executive and senior management roles.

Why does the government want to end data collection?

Lucas said the annual reporting requirements impose “hundreds of millions of dollars” in costs on employers, a burden she said was unnecessary in the absence of “any allegation, indication or evidence of discrimination.”

The move was recommended by Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation blueprint that has guided many of the Trump administration’s policies.

A group of former Democratic EEOC commissioners and legal advisers said there is little evidence that companies routinely use employment data to engage in quotas or hire based on race.

“This is simply inaccurate and unsupported speculation, and is inconsistent with the ways in which this data is collected, managed, and used,” the former officials said in a statement.

Instead, officials said, tracking such data encourages companies to proactively examine their hiring, promotion, benefits and other policies to ensure they are not erecting barriers unnecessarily. The agency also released special reports on demographic hiring trends across specific industries or roles.

Companies decline demographic disclosure

The EEOC is prohibited from publicly releasing an individual company’s Form EEO-1, releasing the information only in aggregate form. However, in recent years, a growing number of the country’s largest companies have begun making their models public in response to pressure from shareholders and Democratic elected officials to show transparency in their diversity efforts.

This trend has begun to reverse.

Companies have begun to back away from publishing their EEO-1 forms and diversity reports, which conservative advocates and the Trump administration have seized on to argue that companies use discriminatory tactics to add women and minorities to their ranks.

In 2025, 24 companies in the S&P 100 index — the largest publicly traded U.S. companies — chose not to disclose their EEO-1 data after doing so the previous year, according to Andrew Jones, a principal researcher at the Conference Board’s Center for Governance and Sustainability. However, 60 S&P 100 companies released data.

Why companies might continue to collect data

Companies are still likely to track their demographic data, whether or not they disclose any of these metrics publicly, and even if they are no longer required to file annual EEO-1 reports. This is because Title VII requires employers to keep records that could be relevant to any discrimination investigation, and the EEOC has the authority to request them.

“What we generally advise is to stay the course,” said Jennifer Robbins, an attorney with the law firm Saul Ewing’s Labor and Employment Group. “Private litigants and employment discrimination cases are not going away, and this data is useful for self-defense.”

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requested extensive demographic data from companies to support Lucas’s own cases. Those investigations include a probe into the diversity, equity and inclusion practices of sports giant Nike, which Lucas alleged discriminated against white employees.

Lucas stressed Tuesday that the EEOC will continue to request data in the course of its investigations. Kotagal warned employers that under future leadership, the EEOC could re-establish the EEO-1 pool.