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How many women hold executive-level positions at top U.S. companies? What is the racial and ethnic breakdown of those roles? What is the gender and racial breakdown of the lowest-paid roles at those companies?
The Trump administration is making it harder for the public to know, moving to toss aside a 60-year-old requirement for tens of thousands of private sector employers to submit workforce demographic reports each year to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination laws in the workplace.
The EEOC's Republican majority voted 2-1 Tuesday to rescind the data collection requirement, submitting the proposal to a 30-day public commentary period before final approval. The proposal is a quiet but profound salvo in President Donald Trump's shake up of civil rights enforcement, ending a practice that has endured through 10 Republican and Democratic administrations.
EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, an outspoken critic of diversity and inclusion practices who has urged white men to come forward with discrimination complaints, argued that requiring companies to submit the annual demographic reports risks encouraging companies to justify discriminatory practices to diversify their workforce.
Former Democratic EEOC commissioners and civil rights organizations have denounced the proposal, saying it will deprive the agency of a critical tool for uncovering discrimination patterns and tracking how women and racial minorities have fared since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which created the EEOC and prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, national origin and religion.
The EEOC, which receives more than 88,000 worker complaints each year, has historically used the data to guide its enforcement priorities and inform some of its investigations.
Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, the sole Democrat left on the EEOC since Trump moved to wrest control of the agency, voted against the proposal.
"Today, the commission discusses whether to turn back time to a period before the civil rights movement, kneecapping its ability to protect workers," Kotagal said.
Since 1966, the EEOC has required companies with at least 100 employees, or federal contractors with at least 50 workers, to submit a form called the EEO-1 each year.
The data typically covers more than 50 million employees and 73,000 employers nationwide.
Women remain underrepresented in the top ranks of companies. While they make up nearly half the workforce at the companies surveyed, women held just 34.5% of executives and senior manager roles in 2023. That was up from 29.2% a decade earlier.
White and Asian women made the fastest gains, and by 2023, were no longer underrepresented in senior roles compared to their numbers in the overall workforce. In contrast, Black and Hispanic women remained sharply underrepresented in executive and senior manager roles despite making modest gains.
Asian men have been proportionally represented in senior roles for years, while Black and Hispanic men remained underrepresented in 2023.
Of those demographic groups, only one was overrepresented in senior roles: white men, who made up a third of the overall workforce at the companies surveyed but held 52.7% of executive and senior management roles.