©2025 Seyfarth Shaw LLP EEOC-INITIATED LITIGATION: 2025 EDITION | 66 65 | EEOC-INITIATED LITIGATION: 2025 EDITION ©2025 Seyfarth Shaw LLP D Retail The EEOC filed a number of lawsuits against retail companies in 2024, with an emphasis on discriminatory hiring practices and pre-employment qualifications related to the applicant’s disability, pregnancy, and/ or race. The EEOC also filed several lawsuits alleging disability and sex-based harassment, including cases related to harassment on the basis of gender identity. This is an area of interest for the EEOC, which released new guidance on workplace harassment with respect to sexual orientation and gender identity in April 2024. KEY CASES FILED IN FY 2023 EEOC v. ABC Phones of North Carolina, Inc. d/b/a Victra, Case No. 3:24-cv-00444 (D. Nevada). The EEOC filed suit on behalf of an employee who was not allowed to leave a new hire training early for an urgent medical evaluation related to her pregnancy. Instead, the company rescinded the job offer and told the employee to reapply once she knew she could attend the full training. According to the EEOC, other new hires were permitted to adjust or reschedule their training for various reasons unrelated to pregnancy. The EEOC alleges violations of Title VII and the ADA. EEOC v. Heart of Texas Goodwill Industries, Inc., Case No. 6:24-cv-00498 (W.D. Texas). The EEOC alleges that the employer violated the ADA when it failed to hire an applicant because she was deaf. The EEOC claims that the manger told the applicant she was not eligible for a role because her disability may raise a safety concern and failed to follow-up on the applicant’s request for a reasonable accommodation. EEOC v. Lush Handmade Cosmetics, Case No. 5:24-cv-06859 (N. D. California). The EEOC alleges that a company manager subjected LGBTQI+ employees to offensive physical and verbal sexual conduct, including unwanted touching of their buttocks, requesting sex, commenting about their breasts and his penis, inquiring about sex acts relating to their sexual orientation and/or gender identity, and using sexually offensive terms. According to the EEOC, the company failed to adequately investigate the employees’ complaints and the harassment continued. As a result, at least two employees quit. 6 Retail Industry Merit Cases Filed in FY 2024 San Francisco Birmingham Dallas Philadelphia 3 1 1 1 EEOC District Offices Bringing Suit & Number of Lawsuits Brought by Each District Statutory Basis for Suit 10: Title VII 3: ADA 1: PDA ©2025 Seyfarth Shaw LLP E. Technology Consistent with the priorities articulated in its Strategic Enforcement Plan, in FY 2024, the EEOC issued a report focusing on what it claims are demographic disparities in the technology industry. The EEOC’s report, issued on September 11, 2024 and entitled High Tech, Low Inclusion: Diversity in the High Tech Workforce and Sector 2014-2022, focused on the “high tech workforce”, which the EEOC defined as workers in 56 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations, regardless where they were employed, as well as the “high tech sector”, which the EEOC defined as industries where at least 20% of the workforce holds STEM occupations—a threshold that includes many employers who might not consider themselves a “high tech” company. Methodology The EEOC relied on three sources of data when creating this report: American Community Survey (ACS) data from 2014-2022, EEO-1 Reports from 2014-2022, and the 2022 EEOC administrative records of discrimination charge filings. The ACS data is collected by the U.S. Census Bureau through an ongoing monthly survey that provides vital information about America’s workforce. This comprehensive survey samples approximately 3.5 million households annually, gathering detailed demographic, employment, and occupational data that represents the entire U.S. labor force – including public and private sector workers and self-employed individuals. The EEO-1 reports, in contrast, provide a more focused but limited dataset. These reports must be filed with the EEOC by private sector employers with 100 or more employees (and federal contractors with 50 or more employees), detailing their workforce demographics by job category, race/ethnicity, and gender. While more limited in scope than the ACS, the EEO-1 data offers employer-level insights into workforce composition at larger private companies. But the job categories in the EEO-1 reports have not changed for decades, and so they use broad occupational groupings that don’t align well with modern tech roles. To overcome this limitation, the EEOC used the ACS data’s more detailed occupational classifications to identify 56 specific STEM occupations and analyze the high tech workforce, while using the EEO-1 data primarily to examine demographic patterns by employer size within the broader tech sector. Finally, the EEOC attempted to match its administrative records of charges of discrimination filed in calendaryear 2022 to employer records in its EEO-1 data, in order to draw conclusions about whether and how discrimination charge patterns in the high tech sector differ from those in other industries. But the EEOC was only able to match approximately 36% of its total charge records for this period to a specific employer’s EEO-1 report, largely because the EEOC’s charge filing system lacked complete and accurate industry codes for many employers. Despite these limitations, this matching process attempted to make a systematic comparison of discrimination charge patterns between the high tech sector and other industries. Those attempting to draw broad-based conclusions from this analysis should be cautious given that nearly twothirds of the EEOC’s charge data for this period was not included. (A footnote in the EEOC’s report asserts without further explanation or analysis, “Although more research is needed, the results suggest that the subset of matched administrative records are generally representative of all charge records.”) The EEOC’s Conclusions and Implications The EEOC’s report concludes, among other things, the EEOC’s view that: • Female, Black, and Hispanic workers remained substantially underrepresented in the high tech workforce and sector. According to the EEOC, between 2005 and 2022 there was very little change in the representation of Black workers and virtually no change in the representation of female workers occurred in the high tech workforce. • Black, Hispanic and Asian workers were purportedly underrepresented in managerial positions compared to their participation in the high tech workforce overall. • While women are nearly half of the total U.S. workforce, the EEOC reports that they were just 22.6%of the high tech workforce in all industries, and even more underrepresented in higher-paying high tech jobs within the high tech sector.
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