If We Stop Counting, Who Disappears?

For almost 60 years, a seemingly mundane government form has helped tell an important story about who gets hired in America, who moves up, and who remains concentrated at the bottom.

It is called the EEO-1.

Since 1966, many large employers have been required to report information to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about the race, ethnicity and sex of their workforce across different job categories. It is not glamorous work. There are no rallies around filing employment reports. Most workers have probably never heard of the EEO-1. Yet the information it produces has helped the federal government, researchers, employers and civil rights advocates identify patterns that individual employees might never be able to see on their own.

Now that system could disappear.

In July, the EEOC voted to advance a proposal that would eliminate the EEO-1 reporting requirement, along with several other workforce reporting requirements. The agency argues that collecting demographic information can impose costs on employers and could encourage employers to make decisions based on race or sex. The public comment period on the proposed rule closed August 24. As of this writing, the proposal has not become a final rule.

There is a larger question underneath all of this, and it is one worth asking plainly: If we stop counting inequity, does inequity go away?

Of course it doesn’t. What disappears is some of our ability to see it.

Reuters recently reported on the debate and quoted Barbara Moskowitz of the Institute for Workplace Equality, an organization whose members include some of the nation’s largest employers. Her assessment was simple: “The data is not the problem. Eliminating it does not eliminate discrimination. It eliminates our ability to see it.”

That distinction matters, particularly for Black workers and especially for Black women.

The discrimination most people imagine is direct and obvious: someone says something racist, a manager openly refuses to hire a Black candidate, or an employee is explicitly told that race played a role in a promotion decision. But discrimination has rarely required that kind of confession. Sometimes the evidence is in the pattern.

Perhaps Black women are well represented among entry-level employees but almost absent from management. Perhaps they are hired at similar rates but promoted less frequently. Perhaps a company has a large Black workforce, but the overwhelming majority of its Black employees are concentrated in its lowest-paying occupational categories. One employee looking at her own experience may suspect something is wrong. Data can tell us whether she is standing inside a much larger pattern.

That is precisely why Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families and the first Black woman to lead the organization, has argued so forcefully for preserving the data. At an August hearing on the proposed change, Frye said, “Collecting data does not cause discrimination.” She warned that losing EEO-1 data would make discrimination harder to detect and civil rights laws harder to enforce.

Frye has been making this case for years. In earlier testimony before the EEOC, she argued that EEO-1 data has helped identify disparities in “who gets certain jobs and who does not.” She also pointed to something that deserves more attention: looking at race or gender alone can obscure what is happening to women of color. The experience of Black women does not always appear when we examine “women” as one group or “Black workers” as another. Good data allows us to see what happens at the intersection.

And right now, there is plenty we need to see.

Economist Valerie Wilson, who directs the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy and previously led research at the National Urban League, examined employment trends in 2025 and found that Black women experienced unusually steep employment losses. “Black women bore the brunt of the economic slowdown,” Wilson wrote. Their employment rate fell 1.4 percentage points in 2025, one of the sharpest one-year declines in a quarter century. College-educated Black women were among those experiencing significant losses.

That last point is especially important because it disrupts one of the most persistent stories Black women have been told about economic mobility: get the education, earn the credential, work hard, and opportunity will follow. Black women did that. They became one of the most highly educated groups in the country. They moved into professional careers. They became managers, entrepreneurs, physicians, attorneys, educators, executives and leaders. Yet education has not erased racial and gender disparities in earnings, advancement or job security.

That is why employment data is more than a spreadsheet. It is a way of testing the promises institutions make against the outcomes they produce. A company can say it values opportunity. Data can tell us where that opportunity exists. A workplace can say everyone has an equal chance to advance. Data can reveal who actually advances. Policymakers can insist discrimination is becoming less relevant to the American workplace. Data gives the public a way to test that assumption.

And interestingly, resistance to eliminating EEO-1 reporting is not coming solely from civil rights organizations. Reuters found that even business groups supporting an end to the federal reporting mandate acknowledged that companies use demographic information for legitimate purposes including pay equity reviews, compliance and internal audits. Researchers and workplace experts have argued that the data has become one of the most useful ways to assess employment opportunity over time. There is an uncomfortable truth here. Data can make institutions uncomfortable precisely because data can make disparities difficult to explain away. When numbers consistently reveal differences in hiring, wages, promotion or leadership representation, the conversation changes. We are no longer debating whether one person was overly sensitive, whether one manager had bad intentions or whether one incident was simply unfortunate. We can begin asking a different question: Is there a pattern?

For Black women, that question has enormous economic consequences. Jobs determine far more than a paycheck. Employment can determine access to health insurance, paid leave, retirement savings, stable housing, educational opportunities for children and the ability to build wealth that can be passed from one generation to the next.

This is why employment justice belongs in the conversation about health and well-being. Economic security and health do not live in separate boxes. When a woman is underpaid, repeatedly passed over, pushed out of a profession or concentrated in jobs without adequate benefits, the impact travels home with her.

The debate over EEO-1 reporting may never become a kitchen-table political issue. Most federal data systems do not. But some of the most consequential policy decisions are the ones that happen quietly, buried in regulatory language while the rest of the country is looking elsewhere.

For nearly six decades, America has collected information that allows us to look inside our workplaces and ask who is there, where they are positioned and whether opportunity is actually reaching everyone.

We should think very carefully before turning off the light.

Because when we stop counting people, people do not disappear.

Accountability does.