Equal opportunity?

Let me tell you a story about how I met my reporting ride-or-die and the work we've been doing together for three years now to dig deeper than anyone else on diversity in corporate America.

In 2014, years before I joined USA TODAY, Jessica Guynn persuaded some of America’s biggest tech companies to share a one-page document that few even knew existed, a federal form called an EEO-1. Her reporting detailed the lack of women and people of color in Silicon Valley, particularly in positions of influence, even as these companies topped stock indexes and touted their diversity records.

Every year, companies send the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission a count of workers by race, ethnicity and binary gender in 10 occupational categories.

After the killing of George Floyd in 2020 sparked a nationwide social justice reckoning, businesses pledged to make their workforces better reflect the communities they serve. I was assigned to help Jessica analyze whether this was just talk, analyzing demographic trends at the nation’s 100 largest companies − or at least the 54 we could persuade to release their EEO-1 forms.

Jessica and I never stopped asking companies for their EEO-1s and thinking up questions we could ask the data. We often anticipated each other's next question. How often are Asian women trapped one step below the C-suite? If we focus on the five executives who make the most money and have the most power at each company, what do the demographics look like? We are seeing more boards disclose which members are LGBTQ, so have any big companies achieved parity with the broader population?

I'm data reporter Jayme Fraser, and I collaborate with senior reporter Jessica Guynn to write about diversity in corporate America. Welcome to "This is America," a newsletter about race and identity and how they shape our lives (and keep scrolling for an exciting interview request). Before we dive into our reporting, here is race and justice news we're watching(and keep scrolling for more stories below):

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By June 2023, nearly all companies in the S&P 100 have shared their federal demographic forms with us amid increasing calls for transparency from investors, employees, activists and journalists. (We make it all available at CorporateDiversity.usatoday.com.)

In April, a record number of these demographic forms became public as part of a federal lawsuit filed by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. For the first time, we could see the race, ethnicity, gender and job category of employees who work for more than 19,000 companies who received billions of dollars in federal contracts from 2014 to 2020.

Most are midsize businesses with a few hundred employees. But others employ tens of thousands and have never publicly shared details of their workforce diversity. They include brands from Peet’s Coffee to Northrop Grumman.

Despite a judge’s order, more than 4,000 companies asked the Department of Labor not to publicly release their data. At least a dozen of the largest have paid to settle discrimination claims.

With this growing trove of diversity data, we have new opportunities to measure the pace of progress or the lack thereof. (And you can search the information, too, with our demographic database of companies with federal contracts in 2020.)

Equal opportunity?

Our ability to track demographics in the American workplace traces back to promises the nation’s leaders made in 1965 at the height of the civil rights movement.

That year, President Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order requiring federal contractors to create job opportunities for women and people of color, not merely avoid discrimination.

Researchers with specialized access to the data have shown progress stalled decades ago, particularly when it comes to who reaches the positions with the most power and pay at the top of companies. We can now see from the newly released data on tens of thousands of businesses that federal contractors are no exception.

But perhaps making the data public can lead to change.

Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, who runs the Center for Employment Equity, said public information allows people to compare companies and hold them accountable for their hiring practices. He said diversity, equity and inclusion officers also could use the data to benchmark their companies’ performance against competitors.

“I hope that in the long run this empowers the DEI staff in these firms to push their firms to do better,” said the sociology professor from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Today, 1 in 5 Americans work for a federal contractor who must comply with that historical standard for career opportunity. Those companies receive more than $600 billion a year for services or products they supply the federal government. (See where your tax dollars go at usaspending.gov.)

Wanting to highlight the historic release of demographic data quickly, we focused on the biggest mega-contractors in our first story.

With the support of other reporters, we pulled public records, researched companies, interviewed workers who had filed discrimination lawsuits and analyzed the data to write a story with more detail on the state of diversity among federal contractors. In that second story, we wrote how the race, ethnicity and gender of people at the top of companies receiving public dollars are markedly different from that of the managers, professionals, sales reps and other workers.

The goal of equal opportunity made in 1965 has not yet been met. And at the pace set from 2014 to 2020, it could be decades more.

Interview request:For a future story, we’d like to talk to LGBTQ people about how they navigate their identity at work and whether it affects their career choices. We are seeking perspectives across the age spectrum and are particularly interested to hear from people who are nonbinary or transgender. If you’d like to share your experience or have questions, please email us at jguynn@usatoday.com and jfraser@gannett.com. Have another story idea? Let us know that, too!

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: This is America: Equal opportunity?