Before the Data Goes Dark: What 60 Years of EEO-1 Records Reveal About Race and Rank at Work

The EEOC has voted to stop collecting the survey that, for sixty years, showed who holds which jobs in America. Before it goes dark, look at what it shows.

So before it does, look at what it shows.

The most recent public EEO-1 tabulation covers roughly 78 million private-sector employees at about 73,000 employers. We pulled the 2023 national figures directly from the EEOC’s own published data and sorted them one way: by the share of each group that is White. One pattern runs through every cut of the numbers.

The higher the rung, the Whiter the room

White workers make up 54.9% of the reported private workforce. But that average hides a ladder. Read the EEO-1’s ten job categories from the top of the org chart down, and the White share falls at almost every step.

Source: U.S. EEOC, EEO-1 Component 1 public data, 2023, national. “White” reflects the EEO-1’s White (non-Hispanic) category.

At the top of the building — the executive suite — nearly four in five workers are White. On the loading dock and in the service corridors, it is closer to one in three. The corner office is more than twice as White as the shop floor. This is not a claim or an opinion; it is the government’s own count of 78 million jobs.

The same ladder runs through the economy

Sort the data by industry instead of job level and the gap reappears. Some sectors are far Whiter than the national average; others far less.

Source: U.S. EEOC, EEO-1 Component 1 public data, 2023, national.

The regulated, capital-intensive, higher-paying corners of the economy — utilities, energy, finance, professional services — sit well above the 54.9% line. The low-wage, physically demanding sectors — farm labor, hotels and restaurants, building services — sit far below it. The pattern holds whether you slice by job title or by industry.

Why the EEOC says it wants the data gone

EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, who led the 2–1 vote, argues the report “may promote racial stereotyping at work” and “may encourage employers to engage in discrimination,” and that it costs employers “hundreds of millions of dollars” without proving discrimination on its own.

The Commission’s lone dissenter, Commissioner Kotagal, framed it differently, warning that the agency was weighing “whether to turn back time to a period before the civil rights movement, kneecapping its ability to protect workers.”

You do not have to resolve that debate to notice the practical consequence. A single report has, for sixty years, let anyone — a journalist, a regulator, a researcher, a worker — see the shape of the American workforce without asking a single employer’s permission. After the rule is final, that shared picture stops being drawn.

What this means for a worker who suspects discrimination

Aggregate numbers do not decide anyone’s case. A pattern across 78 million jobs is not proof about one hiring decision, one promotion that went to someone less qualified, one layoff list. But the EEO-1 has always done quieter work: it gives a worker’s individual experience a place to stand. When your account of being passed over lines up with a measurable pattern in your industry and job level, your story stops sounding like a grievance and starts looking like evidence.

Take that public backdrop away and the burden shifts almost entirely onto the individual. The worker — not the employer, and not a federal dataset — has to build the record: the timeline, the comparators, the documents, the statutory hook. That work does not get easier when the data goes dark. It gets more important.

What workers can do now

The EEO-1 rescission is a proposed rule, not yet final, and it is open for public comment for 30 days. Whatever happens to the report, the way a workplace claim is actually won stays the same: on the strength of the individual record, filed with the right agency, on time.

That is the work Thurgood does. We are non-attorney representatives — Authorized Justice Practitioners — who help workers build the evidentiary record through agency representation before the EEOC and state civil-rights and labor agencies: organizing the facts, matching them to the governing statutes, and preserving what the deadlines require, then referring matured cases to plaintiff-side employment firms. For a race discrimination claim — the kind this data speaks to most directly — that record is everything.

The government may be about to stop counting. That is all the more reason for workers to keep their own count — carefully, and while the clock is still running.

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