Behind the Curtain of Workforce Diversity: Evidence from EEO-1 Reports

We leverage the 2023 court-ordered Freedom of Information Act release of standardized Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO-1) reports to examine the workforce diversity of federal contractors. Using the released data for a sample of more than 19,000 publicly traded and private firms, we provide descriptive evidence on the variation in gender and racial diversity of these companies’ workforce. We also document the existence of a racial gap between managers and lower-level employees. A substantial portion of that gap cannot be explained by industry or geographic factors, reflecting the influence of firm-level characteristics. Then, focusing on a sample of more than 800 publicly traded federal contractors, we find robust evidence that the racial managerial gap is associated with firms’ decision to withhold the voluntary disclosure of their EEO-1 forms. Although our findings are subject to several caveats, we provide important evidence on workforce diversity and highlight the importance of using granular, firm-level data to study diversity topics. This paper was accepted by Eric So, accounting. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.07432 .