Shareholder Group Sues Trump Administration Over Workplace Diversity Data
A nonprofit shareholder advocacy group called As You Sow has filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Labor, accusing it of stonewalling a request for workplace diversity data that's been sitting unanswered for more than two years.
The Freedom of Information Act complaint, filed in Washington DC federal court, seeks the release of EEO-1 data for 2021 and 2022. As You Sow has previously used this data to publish reports linking workforce diversity to financial performance — and says investors can't make fully informed decisions without it.
"Workforce diversity is a material business issue that investors increasingly consider in their decision-making," said CEO Andrew Behar. Without this information, said president Danielle Fugere, "investors are flying blind."
The Labor Department did not respond to requests for comment.
What EEO-1 Data Actually Is
Every year, companies with 100 or more employees are required to submit a breakdown of their workforce by race and gender to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The requirement dates back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which created the EEOC but gave it no concrete data to work with. The standardized reporting requirement was the fix — giving enforcement agencies a consistent, comparable picture of who was being hired and promoted across American industries.
For six decades this data has been used to identify discrimination patterns, focus civil rights investigations, and help employers spot gaps in their own workforce. It stayed largely behind closed doors until 2020, when the police killing of George Floyd prompted corporations to voluntarily release more of it under pressure from investors, employees, and customers. Data over the past 12 years have consistently shown that men — and white men in particular — occupy the vast majority of corporate leadership roles.
Why the Trump Administration Wants to End It
Eliminating EEO-1 reporting has been a long-standing goal in certain Republican policy circles. The Heritage Foundation made it a priority in Project 2025. The EEOC has already moved to end the reporting requirement not just for corporations but for labor unions, state and local governments, apprenticeship programs, and schools.
Jonathan Berry, now solicitor for the Department of Labor, said in 2024 that the EEO-1 report is a "reductive document" that forces employers to classify workers into racial categories even without any suspicion of discrimination. "The goal here is to move toward colorblindness and to recognize that we need to have laws and policies that treat people like full human beings not reducible to categories, especially when it comes to race," Berry said.
Why Investors Are Pushing Back
The argument on the other side is less ideological and more financial. Institutional investors — pension funds, retirement accounts, endowments — manage money on behalf of millions of ordinary people and say workforce diversity data is a legitimate factor in evaluating a company's long-term performance and risk management.
New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, trustee of one of the nation's largest public pension funds, says his office plans to formally oppose ending EEO-1 collection at the EEOC level. "EEO-1 reporting gives investors a clear, consistent picture of the corporate workforce to evaluate how the companies we own manage talent, address risk and deliver long-term performance," he said. "Transparency strengthens markets, it does not threaten them."
Will the Data Disappear Entirely
Not completely — but the picture could get patchier. California and Illinois already require employers to submit workforce demographic reports at the state level. Colorado just passed a law requiring the same starting in July 2027. If the federal government stops collecting EEO-1 data, more states are expected to fill the gap with their own requirements.
What that means in practice is a fragmented national picture rather than a consistent, comparable federal dataset — making it harder to spot industry-wide trends, harder for investors to compare companies across state lines, and harder for enforcement agencies to identify discrimination patterns at scale.
The lawsuit from As You Sow is specifically about data that already exists — the 2021 and 2022 reports that were collected but never released. Whether the courts compel the Labor Department to hand it over may be one of the last clear looks at national workforce diversity data before the federal collection system is dismantled entirely.
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