EEOC announced Thursday, July 16, 2020, that they will fund a statistical study of the collected EEO-1 Component 2 data. The Commission voted unanimously that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) will complete “an independent assessment of the quality and utility” of the 2017 and 2018 pay data collected in 2019.
CNSTAT will assemble an expert panel of subject matter experts to complete the assessment; panelists will be screened for potential conflicts of interest throughout the project. The expert panel will evaluate fitness for use of the data, including the utility of pay bands and appropriate uses of the data. The panel will collect information from stakeholders through public meetings and will ultimately provide a final report of recommendations for EEOC. After an independent review by the National Academies, the report will be released publicly. The CNSTAT project began on July 1, 2020 and is expected to be completed by December 31, 2021.
As noted in our summary of the OFCCP and EEOC Spring agendas, EEOC may initiate a rulemaking to include a reporting requirement for pay or related information. The final CNSTAT report will not only evaluate the utility of the Component 2 data, but also inform the approach of a future pay data collection by EEOC.
Stay tuned as we learn more about the panel’s work.
By Amanda Bowman, Associate Principal Consultant at DCI Consulting Group