The fight over killing EEO-1 reporting has split along a new line, and it is not the one HR teams expected. It is not regulators against employers. It is the largest employer-side HR association against the investors who fund the companies it represents.
SHRM, which represents more than 300,000 HR professionals, told the EEOC in a July 22 statement from Chief Administrative Officer Emily M. Dickens that it supports rescinding current EEO reporting requirements, but only if the agency replaces them with what the statement calls a “more modern, accurate, and useful framework” that improves data quality, reflects today’s workforce, reduces unnecessary burden, and gives regulators and employers more meaningful information. Investor advocacy groups, including the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility and shareholder group As You Sow, filed opposing comments in the same window calling EEO-1 data essential to how they evaluate workforce composition and governance risk.
For HR leaders, the split matters because it changes what “wait and see” actually means here. SHRM is not asking the EEOC to keep the current form. It is betting that rescission plus a better replacement is achievable, and staking its comment on that outcome rather than the status quo. If the EEOC rescinds the form without building that replacement framework, which is the scenario investor groups are actively warning against, HR teams lose their most-cited compliance benchmark with nothing standardized to take its place.
The original insight is what SHRM’s conditional stance reveals about employer sentiment: relief from the reporting burden is not the priority driving it, comparability and data quality are. HRTech has covered the investor side of this fight in Killing EEO-1 Won’t Kill Demand for the Data and the EEOC’s original push in EEOC Moves to Scrap EEO-1 Race and Sex Reporting. SHRM’s entry adds an employer-side voice warning against treating rescission as pure burden reduction with no successor system attached, the outcome that would leave HR teams’ benchmarking and pay-equity analysis with a data gap and no fixed timeline for when it gets filled.
