EEOC Votes 2-1 to End Annual Workforce Demographic Reports After 30-Day Comment Period

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Republican majority voted 2-1 Tuesday to rescind the requirement that companies with at least 100 employees submit annual EEO-1 workforce demographic reports. Fortune reported that the proposal now enters a 30-day public comment period before final approval.

” Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, the panel’s sole Democrat, voted against the measure and said the commission was turning back time to a period before the civil rights movement.

Since 1966 the EEOC has collected the forms from employers with 100 or more workers and from federal contractors with 50 or more. The form breaks the workforce into 10 job categories and records the number of male and female employees by race and ethnicity. The data cover more than 50 million employees at 73,000 employers.

The EEOC receives more than 88,000 worker complaints each year and has used the aggregated figures to set enforcement priorities. The most recent publicly available data are from 2023; the agency collected 2024 data but has not released them. Collection for 2025 would have started this year.

In 2023 women held 34.5 percent of executive and senior manager positions, up from 29.2 percent in 2013. White men, who made up one-third of the overall workforce, held 52.7 percent of those senior roles. Lucas said the reporting imposes hundreds of millions of dollars in annual costs on employers.

The proposal was recommended by Project 2025. In 2025, 60 S&P 100 companies still released their EEO-1 data while 24 others stopped doing so. The EEOC is barred from releasing individual company forms and publishes only aggregate statistics.