The EEOC Is Sending Us Back to Jim Crow Days

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency created to enforce civil rights law in the workplace, recently voted 2-1 to stop requiring employers to report the race and gender of their employees. This requirement has been in place for 60 years. Their reasoning? Collecting the data itself may be discriminatory.

Seriously.

I was quoted in this Forbes piece by Dr. Janice Gassam Asare on this decision, and I want to expand on on that here, because this is bigger than one policy change (which has not yet been finalized).

Remember 2020? Remember when your employer put out statements about racial justice? When they hired a head of DEI? When they launched an internal audit to see how many Black employees they actually had, how many women were in leadership, where the gaps were?

Some of those employers actually followed through. Many quietly stopped. The DEI hire got laid off. The audit results never shared. The promises faded.

Now the federal government is telling every employer in America: you don’t even have to count anymore. If you cannot measure a problem, you can pretend it doesn’t exist.

As I told Forbes: You cannot fix what you cannot see.

This move is just the latest in a string of bad decisions being made by a reactionary EEOC under Trump. Taken in that context, it’s not surprising. These moves to send us back to Jim Crow days only embolden employers who were already disinclined to follow the law.

This is the same message employers have been getting from Washington for the past two years. Gut DEI. Dismantle diversity programs. Defund civil rights enforcement. And now: stop collecting the data.

For my clients, this is personal. Discrimination by a thousand cuts is already hard to prove. The patterns are subtle: who gets promoted, who gets PIP’d, who gets laid off. Workforce data is one of the few tools that makes the invisible visible. Without it, it’s your word against theirs. And we know how that goes.

But as I also told Forbes, employers need to understand that the underlying federal civil rights laws have not changed, only this administration’s twisted interpretation of them.

Nothing is stopping employers from collecting their own data. A change in the political winds can happen quickly and they should not get too complacent.

The ones who actually care will keep counting anyway.

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