The launch of “EEOC Explore” is the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) latest step toward its vision to “build a 21st century data and analytics organization.”

In December 2018, the EEOC created the Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics (OEDA). Since its inception, the OEDA has been working on modernizing EEO data availability. As part of its December 2, 2020 launch of EEOC Explore, the agency demonstrated the features of its new tool, which furthers OEDA’s vision by working to modernize EEO data availability.

A data query and mapping tool, EEOC Explore aggregates publicly available EEO-1 data (currently limited to EEO-1 data sets from 2017 and 2018) into a series of interactive dashboards. The OEDA is expected to further develop and expand the size, scope, and functionality of EEOC Explore as its work continues.

EEOC Explore visualizes employment characteristics and information without identifying any employer or employee confidential information, protecting the EEO-1 data that was previously submitted by employers. The underlying EEO-1 data is then presented to users through five primary dashboards:

(i) job categories by gender;

(ii) race/ethnicity by gender;

(iii) industry;

(iv) state trends by year; and

(v) comparison by state.

Once a user selects a dashboard, they can filter the applicable data by year, geography, sex, race/ethnicity, job category, NAICS code (2-digit), and NAICS code (3-digit) to view more granular data. Within each dashboard, users can view the data’s aggregated totals by category and use filters to break down the information by race, gender and job category, or focus in on one specific race, gender, and job category.

During the demonstration, the OEDA used the example of comparing employment in the finance industry between Silicon Valley and the Atlanta Metro area, starting with the Industry dashboard, then filtered by the year (2018), the Silicon Valley and Atlanta Metro geographic areas, and the finance and insurance NAICS codes.

EEOC Explore is a useful, ready-made tool, but employers understandably may require context and more in-depth analysis to meet the legal and operational needs of their organization.