How do you make workplace injustices disappear? The Trump administration’s plan is to simply stop counting them.
Late last week, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced that it may no longer require larger employers to collect demographic information on the sex, race, and ethnicity of their workers. In response, a dozen former EEOC officials released a statement warning of the risks to workers, employers, and the public if the agency abandons collecting demographic data. As the former officials correctly highlight, these data serve as the foundation for evidence-based decisionmaking to ensure fair practices in the workplace.
This change directly targets important protections against discrimination for workers. It is also, of course, an attack on science—a familiar page out of the authoritarian playbook to suppress facts and consolidate power. UCS has been tracking the Trump administration’s attacks on science. We believe the EEOC’s plan to halt data collection is yet another example of an attack on science: it appears to be a politically-motivated effort to suppress publicly-relevant information.
Employee data have a long history
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a dataset is worth a million. Data help us uncover patterns including, for example, discrimination patterns in hiring or pay for workers. The EEOC has been tasked with collecting this information since 1966. The US Constitution requires equal protections for all citizens, and over the years the US Congress has enacted laws refining the rights of employees, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1997, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was created in 1965 under Title VII, and in 1966 the newly formed EEOC promulgated a new rule, called regulation EEO-1, outlining the process to ensure employers with 100 or more employees comply with the law by reporting workforce demographic data on sex, race and ethnicity, across each year.
For nearly sixty years the EEOC has protected underserved and historically disenfranchised workers. If this administration is able to push through these proposed changes at EEOC, those protections could come to a halt. Under Trump 2.0, the EEOC has already taken actions that strip transgender and nonbinary workers of workplace protections and removing the option to include non-binary employee counts in the EEO-1 reporting notes, undermining the comprehensiveness of this data. These dogged attempts to undermine employer data in order to ignore laws protecting workers shouldn’t be surprising to anybody: the first Trump administration attempted to stop this data collection, and it was a target of the Project 2025 agenda.
Employee demographic data inform worker protections
The EEOC serves as the primary enforcement agency at the federal level to protect against workplace discrimination. It investigates complaints and seeks resolution through a multi-tiered resolution framework that includes mediation and conciliation. If these early approaches fail, individuals may pursue claims in federal or state courts or through other arbitration systems. The data that the EEOC collects serve as fundamental evidence in these processes.
That’s why these data are essential to advancing the agency’s core mission: ensuring equal employment opportunity. These official government numbers—across 56 million employees and 73,000 employers – are the only reliable way to compare demographics across companies and years nationwide. While the individual EEO-1 reports are confidential, the EEOC uses these data to inform investigations of employment discrimination, help identify where there may be barriers to equal opportunity, focus limited resources to address violations, and publish public-facing reports that aggregate the data to identify trends. For example, in 2024 the EEOC issued a report with findings that Black, Hispanic and female workers continue to be substantially underrepresented in the high-tech workforce. This type of information is useful in pointing out where we, as a country, need to identify and address the barriers that perpetuate these gaps—gaps that are prevalent in the sciences.
Outside of the EEOC, these data are used by state and local agencies that enforce civil rights laws; employers who want to ensure there aren’t unintentional hiring barriers; researchers; and the media. These entities can also help identify and inform actions to reduce disparities in the workplace. For example, the Center for Investigative Reporting used public EEO-1 reports to examine diversity at Silicon Valley tech companies. Their report found that, although needing improvements, the dataset is useful for comparing diversity at Silicon Valley tech companies and highlighting the blind spots they have when it comes to women of color, regardless of their public messaging.
Hiding the data means abandoning the law
Without these data, we lose the ability to protect underserved and historically disenfranchised workers, including women, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ workers. Workplace discrimination is real and disproportionately impacts these communities, and federal data collection offers us solid evidence of workplace discrimination in the US. In 2023, the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine published a report looking at the EEO-1 data to investigate pay discrimination. Their first two statements assert that there are inequalities in the earnings between men and women, and between groups with different race and ethnicities. The report demonstrates that these differences—according to evidence and data—cannot be fully explained by employees’ education, experience, or occupation. Worker surveys back up this finding. In a 2023 Monster Poll, nine out of ten (91%) of respondents said they have experienced discrimination at work, and 77% reported witnessing employment discrimination. If we close our eyes to problems, the problems still exist—they’re just harder to understand and solve.
The administration isn’t uniformly against collecting demographic data, as long as that collection serves their political purposes. But by declining to collect data about demographics and discrimination in the workplace, they’re deliberately evading their responsibility to enforce anti-discrimination laws.
The administration has been on an anti-DEI crusade. They’ve used their disdain for DEI as an excuse to slash programs and cancel funding across the administration. Back in the real world, science shows us that diversity is our strength. Our country’s laws prohibit discrimination in the workplace, and businesses benefit when there is equal treatment and a diverse workforce. Research studies in this area report that when there are diverse and inclusive management teams and staffs, there is greater employee engagement and satisfaction, more innovation, and greater productivity and profitability. According to its own website, an EEOC study reports more innovation in the tech industry when diverse teams are a part of research and development. That same research study showed that companies with diverse employees are better at attracting talent, improving employee satisfaction and retention, and increasing customers and sales revenue. Additionally, in this report they state that employees in more diverse workplaces are less likely to experience harassment. Interestingly, a National Institute of Standards and Technology special publication found that software developers with similar demographic backgrounds tended to make similar misjudgments, while diverse teams resulted in better performance. These data inform practices that reduce hiring barriers and biases in pay. Losing this dataset means losing the benefits of a diverse workforce and fair workplace practices. It’s a willful decision to ignore the evidence, disregard the law, and enable workplace discrimination.
We can support worker protections and science
This administration has enacted multiple types of attacks on science: cutting funding, firing federal scientists, releasing dubious reports that undermine the best available science, and enacting executive orders that reduce scientific integrity requirements and scientific independence. Recently, the Scientific Integrity Act was introduced in the US Senate, which would require federal agencies to institute scientific integrity policies, creating a federal government culture that supports science, scientists, and science-based policies. With stronger protections for science and scientists, it would be harder for political appointees to halt data collection and studies that they don’t want to consider.
You can sign this petition to demonstrate your support for the Scientific Integrity Act. Additionally, taking away the data that support worker protections must go through a rule change, and that change, by law, includes a public comment process. Once the proposal posted, you will be able to comment on this rule here, to oppose halting data collection that supports fair workplaces.