What’s happening with the EEO-1 data? An update
Nearly four years ago I posted an update about the (un)availability of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's data. I promised that I would update when I have more information. I finally do. I post here the announcement that went out from Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, from the Sociology department at the University of Amherst, who has long been the point of contact between the EEOC and academic researchers:
After a hiatus of eight years the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is making its incredible data resources available again to the research community. These data will be found in Census Research Data Centers and access procedures are detailed below.
These are establishment and firm level data on employment race-gender-occupation composition over time as well as discrimination charges filed with the EEOC and state Fair Employment Practice Agencies. Data are geocoded to the address level and contain company names. At the end of this email you can find some published examples of the use of these data. You will not find any examples of scholars who have used the data on labor hiring halls. Someone should be the first.
I am happy to answer any questions you have about the data that I can, but direct you to David Bowden at the EEOC for getting access and better answers.
With excitement,
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey
University of Massachusetts, Center for Employment Equity
It is also useful for people to have the original announcement from the EEOC, specifically from David Bowden, who is now managing the access team:
The EEOC is in the process of joining the Standard Application Process (SAP) portal hosted at https://www.researchdatagov.org/. We welcome and encourage researchers to submit applications via email to data.access@eeoc.gov. For projects using only EEOC data (along with any user-supplied data), we will be able to fully review and approve email submissions.
Proposals using data from both the EEOC and other federal agencies (see researchdatagov.org for a list of participating agencies and datasets) will eventually need to be submitted to the SAP portal as well so that each relevant agency can review the application. That said, submitting the proposal via email should slightly expedite the timeline for accessing the data as we will be able to review the EEOC-relevant portions of the application. Copying the application to the online portal should be fairly straightforward.
Once an application has been approved, the researcher will be contacted by Census Bureau staff to complete the other steps for obtaining access to FSRDC facilities, including gaining Special Sworn Status. This process may be expedited for researchers who already have Special Sworn Status from a previous project.
Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions, as well as any requests to be removed from this mailing list. We also encourage you to forward this information to other researchers.
Best,
David Bowden, PhD
Statistician, Data Policy and Access Team
Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
(202) 921-2775 | david.bowden@eeoc.gov
This is very good news for the research community. It has been an incredibly long time since we had access to these data. Most publications that have come out using them in recent years have been those that, like mine, are based on data obtained before the hiatus was put into place and that therefore stop their time series in the mid-2010s. All sorts of questions, like what happened to employment segregation during the Trump years, have been left unanswered.
It is deeply bittersweet news for me, though. To work inside the Census Research Data Centers, you have to obtain Special Sworn Status. This is a non-trivial process, and one clear rule is that you have to be resident in the United States for at least three years, with a U.S. employer. Five and a half years ago, I moved to Canada to take a job at McGill. Thus I cannot obtain Special Sworn Status and cannot work on these data directly anymore.
I am enough of a control freak when it comes to research that this is maddening. I realize that all is not lost, though. This is an opportunity for me to forge more relationships with co-authors in the United States who can work with the data. It's at moments like this when I remind myself that Blau and Duncan published The American Occupational Structure without ever working directly with the Census data, instead designing batch jobs that were run at one remove.
I even have a research project that, were we able to get some other data, would use the EEO-3 data on union hiring halls that Don mentions in his email! So if you are an ambitious stratification researcher who is interested in getting access to and working in the Census Data Centers, please keep me in mind?