Andrea Hsu of NPR reported that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is advancing a plan to end the collection of the demographic information companies have sent the federal government through the EEO-1 system, a dataset used to help identify and investigate workplace discrimination.
The EEO-1 requirement has been in place since 1966, under which employers with 100 or more workers must provide the government with demographic details about employees’ race, ethnicity and sex, according to NPR’s report. The federal data is intended to support the EEOC’s efforts to root out discrimination in hiring and employment.
In NPR’s account, the practical value of the data is illustrated by the EEOC’s lawsuit against Bass Pro Shops that began in 2011. The EEOC alleged that Bass Pro discriminated against Black and Hispanic job applicants, not only at individual stores but across the company nationwide, including in counties with sizable Black and Hispanic populations.
David Lopez, who was the EEOC’s general counsel when the case started, said the EEOC’s demographic information mattered because it helped investigators focus attention where there was a reason to investigate. He described the idea as store-by-store, where some areas had significant numbers of Blacks and Latinos but stores showed “either zero or very few at the stores,” and he said the agency used the company’s demographic data to look for what he described as discriminatory animus in managerial comments.
NPR reported that, in court filings, Bass Pro said the allegations were “threadbare.” The case lasted for years before the company settled for $10.5 million, NPR said, and the company did not admit wrongdoing. NPR said the settlement included steps such as appointing a diversity director and making good-faith efforts to recruit and hire nonwhite candidates.
Lopez, now a law professor at Arizona State, told NPR that while investigators could have a “hunch,” the demographic data provided “cold, hard numbers.” He later said that, without EEO-1 data, it would be harder to build cases like the Bass Pro lawsuit, arguing that hiring discrimination is “really hard to detect.”
EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, NPR said, has raised concerns about how workforce demographic data can be used once it is widely shared. NPR reported that Lucas told NPR earlier this spring that one problem she sees with the data is that it is shared too widely, and that she believes knowledge of workforce demographics should be confined to HR so hiring managers do not end up swayed by a candidate’s sex or race.
In NPR’s reporting, Lucas said that companies were gathering the data and “publicizing it for the world,” and she argued that she saw a foreseeable risk that the information could start turning into “race-motivated decision-making.” She also said the EEOC has made investigating discrimination against white men an agency priority, and NPR reported that the EEOC is investigating hiring practices at Nike and The New York Times.
Outside the agency, NPR quoted David Cohen, of DCI Consulting, as saying that the EEOC would want the data to see whether certain industries have issues, including as they relate to whites and men. He also told NPR that, for companies, keeping track of employee demographics can be a “smart business move” even when the government does not require it, because it can function as a tool to detect problems in recruiting, managerial behavior, or screening decisions.
In a comparison to driving, Cohen said, “It’s like you’re driving a car without a dashboard,” adding that without demographic tracking a company has “no idea what’s going - am I speeding? … am I not speeding? … Is my check engine light on?” and “You have nothing.” NPR said Lopez made a similar point that ending the data collection would make it harder to detect discrimination.