-- The corporate reckoning that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd has led to a historic new era of transparency. Just three years on, most of the largest US companies are sharing data on the race and gender makeup of their workforce — information that many of them previously only gave privately to the federal government. Despite the recent debate over the future of diversity efforts in American workplaces, experts expect the recent trend for openness to continue.
“The ball’s rolling downhill and I don’t see much changing because it’s not just investors and activists that are pushing for this,” said Josh Ramer, chief executive officer and founder of DiversIQ, a company that tracks and analyzes the submissions made via EEO-1 forms. “Transparency is really important to people so that they can judge for themselves.
Some version of the form has been collected for companies with 100 or more workers since 1966, after it was included in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The form mandates that companies break down their workforce by seven racial and ethnic groups and by gender, and then divide them among 10 job categories, from executives and managers through to service workers and laborers.
Bloomberg News collected most of the EEO-1 data prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling. None of the half-dozen companies with the most notable diversity gains wanted to discuss them in detail.