“Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.”
— Lyndon B. Johnson, Commencement Address at Howard University, June 4, 1965
Sixty years ago, on July 2nd 1965, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) opened its doors, tasked with the responsibility of enforcing protections against employment discrimination that had been enshrined in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The EEOC began its work at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, amid the fervent push to unmask and unravel the entrenched legacy of racism that had perpetuated segregation and inequality for generations. The EEOC’s mission was to help ensure that workplaces operate free of discrimination and advance equal opportunity – and it has played a pivotal role in protecting workers from unfair treatment and the economic instability that comes from discrimination. Over the last decade, from fiscal years 2014 through 2024, the EEOC has recovered $5.6 billion for workers who were discriminated against by their employers. In fiscal year 2024 alone, the agency won nearly $700 million for those who experienced illegal discrimination, including thousands of employees in the private sector. This work combating workplace discrimination has also been vital to our nation’s economic growth. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the EEOC’s role in reducing discrimination has increased average living standards across the country by $493 to $1,233 per person since 1960.
Understanding the EEOC’s essential role, its history, and the continued importance of its work is more critical than ever, especially in a political moment where the Trump administration is aggressively questioning its merit and dismantling longstanding civil rights enforcement tools. Lawmakers established the EEOC because they understood that simply signing a law prohibiting discrimination was not enough – the law needed to be implemented and enforced to ensure compliance. Further, they knew that discrimination would not disappear overnight and there would be an ongoing need for a place where victims could go to vindicate their rights. The EEOC’s enforcement responsibilities have grown over the years to encompass different types of discrimination, and now include laws such as the Equal Pay Act, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and most recently, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
Researchers have found that the work of the EEOC over the years has helped decrease workplace discrimination. Tools used by the agency such as the Employer Information Report, known colloquially as the EEO-1 form, have helped document areas of progress and reveal where problems persist. Adopted in 1966, The EEO-1 form collects employer workforce data broken down by factors such as race, gender, and ethnicity. The tool has proven effective in helping to surface discriminatory practices with data to document disparities and potential discrimination violations, rather than relying on anecdotal evidence alone. In 1966, for example, only about half of reporting establishments employed Black men and more than 70 percent did not employ any Black women. By the early 2000s, almost 80 percent of reporting establishments employed Black men and 72 percent employed Black women or Latino men. Similarly, the percentages of women of all races in managerial positions increased dramatically during this period.
Despite this progress, employment discrimination remains a stubborn reality for too many workers. In 2023, more than 40 percent of Black workers said they had experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly by an employer; more than a third of Black women workers had experienced discrimination due to their race. Sexual harassment and other forms of sex discrimination are also pervasive in the workplace; the EEOC found that 1 in 4 women report experiencing sexual harassment at the workplace. Many instances of employment discrimination go unreported, but approximately a third of the charges made to the EEOC are sex- or race-based charges of discrimination.
Yet, the Trump administration has sought to downplay the existence of discrimination, ending programs that have helped document disparities, rewriting and whitewashing history to minimize past problems, and redefining the corrective measures used to combat discrimination historically as being the real source of the problem. It has weaponized the phrase “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” to make it synonymous with a perceived discrimination against white men and then hidden behind that term to accomplish their real goal: trashing decades of hard-won civil rights laws. Indeed, the conservative agenda laid out in Project 2025 makes explicit its goal of turning back the clock and making it harder to expand opportunity for women, people of color, and other groups. In their vision, when Black employees at a delivery company are segregated from their white coworkers and assigned more strenuous tasks in neighborhoods with higher crime rates, they will have no recourse. When a pregnant employee with medical conditions is denied emergency leave and forced to resign to seek medical attention, and experiences a miscarriage that very day, that worker will have no effective champion in the federal government. The administration also has sought to thwart enforcement altogether – President Trump fired two Democratic EEOC Commissioners, thus eliminating the quorum needed for the EEOC to act. The acting EEOC Chair appointed by the President, Andrea Lucas, has tried to intimidate and target law firms and non-profit organizations to backtrack on civil rights, and has dropped lawsuits on behalf of transgender workers despite clear proof they are protected under civil rights laws.
The 60th anniversary of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is not just a time for celebration or reflection; it is a reminder of where we have been and where we need to go. Undoing decades of progress for workers is not a vision for the future, it’s a return to the past. We need workplaces that reflect the values of inclusion, fairness, and equity that can uplift all workers.
