On December 2, 2020, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) launched a new electronic data tool allowing users to view aggregate demographic data associated with more than 56 million employees and 73,000 employers throughout the United States. The new tool, called EEOC Explore, was developed in collaboration with the National Opinion Research Center (“NORC”) at the University of Chicago, a leading independent social research organization.
The purpose of the new tool is to provider “greater and improved services to the public” on relevant employment data, per a recent EEOC release and statement of its Chair, Janet Dhillon. The NORC collaboration is part of the EEOC’s Data and Analytics Modernization Program, which is led by the EEOC’s Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics (“ODEA”).
EEOC Explore uses aggregate information from employer EEO-1 reports, which are collected annually from private employers with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees. These reports contain employment data, such as information on gender, race, and ethnicity by job category for full-time and part-time employees of the reporting companies. Job categories generally include executive/senior level officials and managers, first/mid-level officials and managers, professionals, technicians, sales workers, administrative support workers, craft workers, operatives, laborers/helpers, and service workers.
The EEOC Explore tool allows users to mine, explore, and analyze data trends across these categories, including by location, sex, race and ethnicity, and industry sector, without the need for experience in computer programming or statistical analysis. EEOC Explore also allows users to access county-level details, which had been unavailable on the static tabular format of the data previously available on the EEOC’s public website. In short, this new program will allow researchers and the public to track employment trends in private industry—such as job patterns of minorities—with much greater ease.
Anyone interested in discussing the EEO reports in general or, more specifically, EEOC Explore, should contact the attorneys at Dolley Law, LLC. We can be reached at (314) 645-4100 or by email at kevin@dolleylaw.com.
