EEOC Launches Resource to Track Employment Trends

On December 2^nd, 2020, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) launched a new interactive tool called “EEOC Explore.” EEOC Explore is a data query and mapping tool that gives users the most current aggregate EEO-1 data publicly available. Users can analyze aggregate data associated with more than 56 million employees and 73,000 employers nationwide. Additionally, stakeholders can compare data trends across a number of categories, including:

• location,
• sex,
• race and ethnicity, and
• industry sector.

Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employers need to submit specific information to the EEOC. This information includes the composition of their workforces by sex and race/ethnicity. EEOC Explore visualizes this aggregate data in ways that are more intuitive and efficient than previous methods.

Overview of EEOC Explore

EEOC Explore uses information gathered from annual employer EEO-1 reports, which include data such as employee demographics. This information comes from private employers with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees. The agency's Explore tool also allows users to see county-level details, surpassing the information previously available on the EEOC’s public website. “[This] makes tracking employment trends as simple as a few clicks,” said Dr. Chris Haffer. The EEOC Chief Data Officer continued, “. . . users now have access to privacy protected aggregate data and can download the data for their own analyses.” The NORC at the University of Chicago collaborated with the EEOC in the creation of EEOC Explore. It was part of the EEOC’s Data and Analytics Modernization Program under the Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics (OEDA). This announcement by the EEOC comes weeks after the agency requested input from employers on religious discrimination enforcement.