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The GOP-led Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted Tuesday to end the agency’s collection of racial and gender employment data. The move comes as the panel’s conservative commissioners try to portray white men as an aggrieved group in corporate America.
The EEOC’s Republican members overruled the panel’s sole Democrat en route to a 2-1 decision to end the decadeslong practice — and you’d be hard-pressed to find a move that better encapsulates the MAGA movement’s aversion to facts and adhesion to bigoted ideology.
PBS summed up the likely impact well:
How many women hold executive-level positions at top U.S. companies? What is the racial and ethnic breakdown of those roles? What is the gender and racial breakdown of the lowest-paid roles at those companies?
The Trump administration is making it harder for the public to know, moving to toss aside a 60-year-old requirement for tens of thousands of private sector employers to submit workforce demographic reports each year to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination laws in the workplace.
EEOC Chairwoman Andrea Lucas, a Trump appointee, has openly called on white men to submit claims of corporate discrimination that can fuel the Trump administration’s bogus propaganda. Unsurprisingly, the EEOC reportedly has struggled to find legitimate claims.
Prior to the vote, Lucas baselessly said the EEOC’s collection of racial and gender data “may promote racial stereotyping at work, and it may encourage employers to engage in discrimination.” After voting to end the practice, Lucas was quoted in an EEOC press release as saying the data collection risked violating a provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it’s not “colorblind.”
The context here is that President Donald Trump, echoing racists during the Jim Crow era, has falsely claimed that the Civil Rights Act has harmed white people. His administration has promoted white supremacist propaganda, and his political movement has lionized purveyors of violent misogyny and racist extremism.
So kneecapping the EEOC’s ability to combat corporate racism and sexism is on-brand for this regime and its allies.
It’s easy to see how no longer collecting this data, and thereby moving corporate decision-making further into the shadows, could enable discrimination. So this move joins a litany of others the Trump administration has made that stand to make discrimination, or outright segregation, easier to commit with impunity.
Noreen Farrell, executive director of the pro-woman workplace advocacy group Equal Rights Advocates, told me last year that the administration’s efforts to undermine the collection of workplace data — at the time, at the Bureau of Labor Statistics — risked turning this data into a “tool of sexism.” And the same applies now with the EEOC.
“First they dismantled workplace protections. Then they gutted DEI programs. Now, as women abandon careers in record numbers, they want to stop counting,” she said. “This is what systematic discrimination looks like in 2025.”
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