What the EEO-1 Actually Does

To understand the stakes, it helps to understand the mechanics. The EEO-1 is not a complaint mechanism. It does not require companies to justify their demographic makeup or commit to any particular workforce composition. It simply requires them to report who is working there, by race, gender, and job classification.

That data, according to former EEOC General Counsel Karla Gilbride, who served in the Biden administration, is often the critical first step in any meaningful enforcement action. Without it, she has noted, investigators would have to subpoena basic workforce data from every company they investigate, making the process dramatically more laborious and inefficient. The EEO-1 gives the agency a running start.

The real-world value of that head start is not hypothetical. Consider the EEOC's landmark lawsuit against Bass Pro Shops, first filed in 2011. The agency alleged that the outdoor retailer had systematically failed to hire Black and Latinx applicants. Not just at one location, but across the country, even in regions with sizable Black and Latinx populations. The agency knew to look because it already had Bass Pro's demographic data on file and could compare it store-by-store to the available labor pool in surrounding areas.

David Lopez, who served as the EEOC’s general counsel at the time and now leads the Civil Rights, Migration and Workplace Law Initiative at Arizona State University, described the data's role plainly: it was the green light that permitted investigators to dig further. What they found, once they dug, were managerial comments reflecting discriminatory intent and a pattern that was difficult to explain as anything other than deliberate exclusion. In 2017, Bass Pro settled for $10.5 million. Without demographic data already in hand, Lopez has said, that case would have been far harder to build.

That settlement is one of many. Since its founding, the EEOC has recovered billions of dollars for workers who faced discrimination, and in case after case, EEO-1 data played a foundational role. Eliminating these data sets is not a bureaucratic trim. It is, functionally, the removal of a cornerstone of civil rights enforcement.

Why Women of Color Cannot Afford to Lose This

The timing of this proposal is particularly consequential for Black women, Latinas, and other women of color, who remain among the most economically vulnerable workers in the country, and whose vulnerability is documented precisely because data like the EEO-1 has existed to capture it. According to the Economic Policy Institute's 2025 analysis, Black women are currently paid just 68.3 cents for every dollar earned by white men, a gap that widened in 2025 for the second consecutive year. For Latinx women, the figure is even more stark at 64.5 cents on the dollar, translating to a wage deficit of more than $23,000 annually for full-time workers.

In 2025, the Institute for Women's Policy Research found that Black women with bachelor's degrees earn just 61.3% of what white men with the same credential earn, and those with professional degrees earn only 60.9%, which means educational attainment does not close the gap. A Department of Labor report found that in 2023, Black women lost an estimated $42.7 billion in wages compared to white men — losses driven by occupational segregation and discrimination that are, at their core, systemic rather than individual.

These disparities are not merely a matter of choices or credentials. Research from the IWPR's 2025 analysis found that Black women with predominantly white coworkers are more likely to be rated as low performers, billed for fewer hours, and required to demonstrate more training than their counterparts. Similar research has found that Black women are held to higher performance standards and are more likely than white women, men of color, and white men to experience workplace harassment.

These are the conditions that EEO-1 data helps identify to examine the patterns that allow researchers, litigants, and investigators to make the case that what is happening is not incidental, but structural. Without that data, the patterns become invisible — or at least, unprovable.

The Political Logic of Making Discrimination Harder to See

It is worth examining the stated rationale for this proposal. EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, appointed by President Trump, has argued that demographic data collection leads to unlawful discrimination against white people. She has publicly positioned the agency's new priority as investigating discrimination against white men, and has framed DEI-adjacent data use as a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Critics argue that this reframing deserves scrutiny. More specifically, the argument that tracking demographic data produces discrimination inverts the established purpose of the EEO-1. The form was created precisely to detect and deter discrimination that was already occurring, not to manufacture it.

As Chai Feldblum, a former EEOC commissioner who served under both the Obama and first Trump administrations, has noted, the 1979 regulation the agency also seeks to rescind — which gave employers a roadmap for voluntary, time-limited race and gender-conscious remediation — was designed to provide a legal framework for addressing documented disparities without overstepping. Eliminating it would remove both the accountability tool and the compliance roadmap at once.

Civil rights attorney and workplace discrimination expert Jessica Ramey Stender, has been direct about the consequences saying the EEOC's proposal will make it significantly harder to identify discrimination against marginalized groups in the workplace. David Cohen of DCI Consulting, who advises companies on civil rights matters, offered a different kind of clarity. Without this data, he has said, companies would be navigating their own workforces like drivers without a dashboard with no way to know whether a pattern exists, no baseline against which to measure, and no early warning system for problems that may otherwise fester unseen.

What Comes Next — And What Women Can Do

The proposed rule has been submitted to the Office of Management and Budget for review and has not yet been published in the Federal Register. Once published, there will be a public comment period, during which individuals, advocacy organizations, and employers can submit formal opposition. That window matters. The public comment process has historically been an effective pressure point for regulatory rollbacks of this kind.

For now, most employment law experts advise companies to continue collecting demographic data even if federal reporting requirements are ultimately eliminated, both because state laws in many jurisdictions maintain independent requirements, and because having baseline workforce data is simply sound business practice. But the question of what happens to workers — particularly Black women and other women of color who have already been losing ground in the wage gap — when the federal government removes its enforcement infrastructure is not a question with a reassuring answer. The data made discrimination visible. Visibility made accountability possible.

Without both, the conditions that have cost Black women $42.7 billion in a single year will continue and will now become harder to prove.