By: Fred Satterwhite and Kate Hayek
California’s Civil Rights Department (CA CRD) has beaten federal government agencies in the race to collect and present data using updated race and ethnicity categories.
As we mentioned last week, CA CRD opened its California Pay Data Reporting web portal on February 3 with updates for the 2024 reporting year.
The requirements for the 2024 reporting year essentially are unchanged from last year’s filing period. However, CA CRD included one notable addition for this year’s filing: reporting data for Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) employees. This new category—defined as “individuals with origins in any of the original peoples of the Middle East or North Africa, including, for example, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, and Israeli”—reflects the 2024 revisions to the White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) guidance on the collection of race and ethnicity data by federal agencies (Statistical Policy Directive 15, or “SPD 15”).
All federal agencies subject to SPD 15 must complete an action plan describing how they will implement the revised OMB guidelines by September 29, 2025, and must ensure that record keeping and reporting requirements are made consistent with the guidelines by March 28, 2029.
Because federal agencies—as well as many employers—currently are working on their plans to implement the new race and ethnicity categories, CA CRD included the following guidance for employers:
For Reporting Year 2024, employers may report race and/or ethnicity of Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) employees following OMB’s 2024 standards if this information is available. Otherwise, employers may continue reporting MENA following prior guidance based on EEOC’s instructions for reporting race/ethnicity on the EEO-1 survey.
CA CRD states in its pay data reporting FAQs that it uses the EEOC’s method for race/ethnicity identification. The California Pay Data Reporting Handbook for Reporting Year 2024 describes this method as follows:
Employee self-identification is the preferred method of identifying race/ethnicity information. If an employee declines to voluntarily provide their race/ethnicity, employers must still report the employee’s race/ethnicity using (in the following order): current employment records, other reliable records or information, or observer perception. CRD recognizes the risk of inaccurate race/ethnicity identification based on observer perception alone; this method should only be used after making a good faith effort to obtain race/ethnicity information from the employee voluntarily and from other reliable records.
In addition to including MENA as a category in Reporting Year 2024, CA CRD removed the word “Other” from the “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander” category name and used “Multiracial and/or Multiethnic” as the new name for the previous “Two or More Races” category. The definitions for these two categories remain unchanged from previous years.
DCI will continue to monitor and provide updates as they occur. Subscribe to our blog by clicking here.
