In 480 BC, 300 brave Spartans defended a strategic crossroad against a Persian army with 100,000 men or more. At times, the hunt for EEO-1 reports has felt just as challenging.
In our June 2 newsletter, we opined on why companies have been reluctant to disclose their EEO-1 reports, and why transparency is the right path forward for all public company stakeholders. At that time, we were just shy of 300 reports from S&P 500 companies in our database.
Last week, we crossed the 300 threshold with the addition of several new reports, including ones from Honeywell and Simon Property Group, both of which faced pressure from the New York City Comptroller. As of today, we have full data for 313 companies in our database, and 22 others have committed to disclose by year’s end.
We also reached out to every one of the remaining S&P 500 companies that do not fully disclose EEO-1 reports and have not publicly commented on future disclosures. Forty six responded, and 11 told us they will disclose this year.
Here are a few observations from the 313 EEO-1 reports we have on file for S&P 500 companies:
- 55 companies, across a wide variety of industries, have no Black executives. This list includes companies such as Activision Blizzard, Hess, Ice Exchange, CME Group, Valero Energy, and Costco. While this is revealing, it should be noted that companies can define what constitutes an executive in any way they want. Costco, for instance, has more than 200,000 employees, but only 30 individuals are listed as executives.
- 101 companies have no Black women executives, and 25 companies have no Asian executives.
- More than 100 companies have executive teams that are largely dominated by men (more than 3/4 of the positions are held by men). At the same time, only five companies – Tapestry (parent company of Coach and Kate Spade), Etsy, Starbucks, Biogen and CDW – have executive teams led by more than half women.
- Ten companies have more than 1/3 of their workforce made up of Hispanic employees — McDonald’s, Wynn Resorts, Edison International, VF Corp., Chipotle, Sempra Energy, Ross Stores, Norwegian Cruise Line, Essex Property Trust, and Lamb Weston. However, the percentage of Hispanic employees at the executive level drops sharply for all these companies, ranging from 18 percent on the high end, to zero percent on the low. Here, we would like to note that Essex Property Trust is a REIT, which by nature is thinly staffed at the executive level (Essex has only four executives).
- Nearly 280 companies have executive teams made up of less than 5% Asian women. When we move down the line things remain relatively consistent, as more than 200 companies have their middle management positions filled by less than 5% Asian women. It should be noted that these percentages are not far off from the representation of Asian women in the general population today, but that seems likely to change. The number of people who identify as Asian has tripled in the past three decades (according to Census records), and the Pew Center projects Asian Americans to be the nation’s largest immigrant group by the middle of the century.
Regarding our methodology, we count a company as fully disclosed when they have provided numerical and intersectional data for all EEO-1 job categories, in 2018 or later (in recognition of lags in reporting and EEO-1 certifications during the pandemic). Some companies roll up job categories or report everything in percentages, and we consider that a partial disclosure.