NEW YORK (AP) — How many women hold executive-level positions at top U.S. companies? What is the racial and ethnic breakdown of those roles? What is the gender and racial breakdown of the lowest-paid roles at those companies?
The Trump administration is making it harder for the public to know, moving to toss aside a 60-year-old requirement for tens of thousands of private sector employers to submit workforce demographic reports each year to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination laws in the workplace.
The EEOC's Republican majority voted 2-1 Tuesday to rescind the data collection requirement, submitting the proposal to a 30-day public commentary period before final approval. The proposal is a quiet but profound salvo in President Donald Trump's shake up of civil rights enforcement, ending a practice that has endured through 10 Republican and Democratic administrations.
EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, an outspoken critic of diversity and inclusion practices who has urged white men to come forward with discrimination complaints, argued that requiring companies to submit the annual demographic reports risks encouraging companies to justify discriminatory practices to diversify their workforce.
“It may promote racial stereotyping at work, and it may encourage employers to engage in discrimination," Lucas said during a hearing ahead of the vote.
Former Democratic EEOC commissioners and civil rights organizations have denounced the proposal, saying it will deprive the agency of a critical tool for uncovering discrimination patterns and tracking how women and racial minorities have fared since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which created the EEOC and prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, national origin and religion.
The EEOC, which receives more than 88,000 worker complaints each year, has historically used the data to guide its enforcement priorities and inform some of its investigations.
Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, the sole Democrat left on the EEOC since Trump moved to wrest control of the agency, voted against the proposal.
“Today, the commission discusses whether to turn back time to a period before the civil rights movement, kneecapping its ability to protect workers,” Kotagal said.
Here's what to know about the reporting requirement and the proposal to end it:
Since 1966, the EEOC has required companies with at least 100 employees, or federal contractors with at least 50 workers, to submit a form called the EEO-1 each year.
The form, which has evolved over time, identifies 10 job categories from “Executive/Senior Level Officials and Managers” to “Laborers” and “Service Workers.” It asks employers to report on the number male and female workers in each job category, as well as the number of workers from different race and ethnicities: Hispanic or Latino, Black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian, American Indian or Alaska Native and two or more races.
The data typically covers more than 50 million employees and 73,000 employers nationwide.
The EEOC launched during the Biden administration an interactive tool allowing the public to explore historical demographic metrics across industries and job categories. The most recent data is from 2023. Under the Trump administration, the EEOC last collected EEO-1 data for the year 2024 but has not publicly disclosed it. Collection of the year 2025 would have begun this year.
The data shows white men dominating executive and senior manager roles at private companies, though women and minorities have made inroads, especially in the years following the #MeToo and Black Lives Matters movements.
Women remain underrepresented in the top ranks of companies. While they make up nearly half the workforce at the companies surveyed, women held just 34.5% of executives and senior manager roles in 2023. That was up from 29.2% a decade earlier.
White and Asian women made the fastest gains, and by 2023, were no longer underrepresented in senior roles compared to their numbers in the overall workforce. In contrast, Black and Hispanic women remained sharply underrepresented in executive and senior manager roles despite making modest gains.
Asian men have been proportionally represented in senior roles for years, while Black and Hispanic men remained underrepresented in 2023.
Of those demographic groups, only one was overrepresented in senior roles: white men, who made up a third of the overall workforce at the companies surveyed but held 52.7% of executive and senior management roles.
Lucas said the annual reporting requirements impose “hundreds of millions of dollars” on costs on employers, a burden she argued was unnecessary absent “any allegation, indication, or evidence of discrimination.”
The move was recommended by Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint that has guided many of the Trump administration’s policies.
A group of former Democratic EEOC commissioners and legal counselors said there is little evidence that companies are routinely using employment data to engage in quotas or race-based hiring.
“This is simply inaccurate and unsupported speculation, at odds with the ways in which this data is actually collected, managed and used,” the former officials said in a statement.
Instead, the officials said, tracking such data encourages companies to proactively examine their hiring, promotion, benefits and other policies to ensure they are not unnecessarily erecting barriers.
Kotagal said the agency has used the data to determine whether a discrimination charge might be part of a deeper pattern at a company. She cited recent investigation of California supermarket chain Vallarta Food Enterprises, in which the EEOC alleges the grocer failed or refused to recruit, hire or promote non-Hispanic individuals. In that case, EEO-1 data showed that “nearly 100 percent of its employees were Hispanic,” Kotagal said. “It’s a key tool in our toolbox.”
The agency has also issued special reports on demographic employment trends across certain industries or roles.
Kotagal highlighted a 2024 report on the tech sector, which showed that women had made virtually no gains between 2014 and 2022, and that workers under 40 years old had actually lost ground. The report also found tech company workers were more likely that others to file age or pay discrimination charges, suggesting systemic barriers to women and older workers in the industry.
The report has been removed from the EEOC’s website.
The EEOC is prohibited from publicly releasing an individual company’s EEO-1 form, only publishing the information in the aggregate. In recent years, however, a growing number of the country’s top companies began publicly releasing their forms in response to pressure from shareholders and Democratic elected officials to show transparency in their diversity efforts.
Many of those companies have complained that job categories in the EEO-1 forms don't align with their internal structures, a point Lucas echoed Tuesday, saying the categories don't reflect the modern workforce. But advocates of EEO-1 disclosure argued it's the only standardized form that allows for comparison across companies, and offer more detail.
However, the trend toward transparency has started to reverse.
Companies have started to pull back on publicizing both EEO-1 forms and their own diversity reports, which conservative advocates and the Trump administration have seized on to argue that companies are using discriminatory tactics to add women and minorities to their ranks.
In 2025, 24 companies in the S&P 100 — the largest U.S. publicly traded companies — chose not to disclose their EEO-1 data after having done so the year before, according to Andrew Jones, principal researcher at The Conference Board Governance & Sustainability Center. Still, 60 S&P 100 companies did release the data.
Meanwhile, fewer companies are publicizing any form of demographic metrics. The number of Russell 3,000 companies that disclosed metrics on women in the workforce fell from 75% in 2024 to 62% in 2025, according to a study by The Conference Board. Those disclosing metrics on minority representation fell from 30.9% to 26.5%.
Companies are still likely to keep track of their demographic data, whether or not they disclose any of those metrics publicly, and even if they are no longer required to submit annual EEO-1 reports. That's because Title VII requires employers to keep records that could be pertinent to any discrimination investigation, and the EEOC is empowered to request them.
“What we are generally advising is to stay the course,” Jennifer Robins, counsel in law firm Saul Ewing’s Labor and Employment Group. “Private litigants, employment discrimination lawsuits are not going away, and this data is helpful to defending oneself.”
The EEOC has demanded extensive demographic data from companies to bolster Lucas' own marquee cases. Those include an investigation into diversity, equity and inclusion practices of sports giant Nike, which Lucas has alleged discriminate against white employees; a lawsuit against the New York Times for allegedly discriminating against a white man who was passed over for a promotion, and an investigation into alleged antisemitism against staff at the University of Pennsylvania.
Lucas emphasized Tuesday that the EEOC would continue to demand data in the course of its investigations. Kotagal warned employers that under future leadership, the EEOC could reinstitute the EEO-1 collection.
Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, said she sees the elimination of EEO-1 data as part of an effort to obscure the prevalence of discrimination against racial minorities and women and create of a sense of urgency around protecting white workers from DEI-related policies.
But Frye said the data "doesn’t suggest that their top priority ought to be discrimination against white men.
"If the chair is moving forward with an agenda that thinks she ought to be focused on men and ought to be focused on white people, my answer is, ‘Well, does the data tell you that?’” Frye said.
The Associated Press’ women in the workforce coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
FILE - Andrea Lucas, nominee to be a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, testifies during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing on June 18, 2025, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib, File)
The U.S. and Iran are back to bombing every day in a bid to control the Strait of Hormuz. And neither is backing down, showing the limitations of President Donald Trump’s reliance on escalating airstrikes to bend Tehran to his will.
While the Trump administration says it is open to diplomacy, Iran so far has refused to loosen its grip over the crucial oil shipping corridor in the Persian Gulf. It is raising questions about the strategy for the conflict's next phase. The intensifying attacks have collapsed an interim ceasefire deal, killed more American troops and sent U.S. gasoline prices back up, posing more problems for Republicans hoping to get reelected.
The Latest:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned senators that troop training would have to be curtailed if the Pentagon doesn’t get the $67 billion in supplemental funds its requesting from Congress. He also raised concerns about troop pay and weapons that defend against enemy drones and missiles.
Hegseth said $46 billion is needed for munitions and expanding production lines, while $21 billion would be for military pay, fuel and replacing equipment.
“Without these funds, we face critical shortfalls that threaten our ability to also simply pay our service members,” Hegseth said.
Democratic lawmakers countered that the Pentagon is yet to spend tens of billions of dollars of money it received last year. But Hegseth doubled down on the need for the supplemental funds.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday he’ll allow American carriers to resume direct flights to Lebanon more than 40 years after the US suspended the route.
Direct flights between the U.S. and Lebanon were suspended in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan’s administration following the hijacking of TWA Flight 847.
“I am hereby directing my Administration to allow all U.S. airline carriers to fly directly to Lebanon so that Americans can easily visit this beautiful land,” Trump said in a social media post after meeting earlier on Tuesday with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun.
During a White House meeting on Tuesday with the country’s leader, Joseph Aoun, Trump pledged to help Lebanon “a lot.” Aoun came to Washington to push for long-term calm after months of war between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group.
▶ Read more
One after another, protestors interrupted the defense secretary’s opening remarks and were quickly removed by Capitol Police. The secretary paused four times for protestors to be removed from the room.
“Stop bombing our children, stop bombing Palestine, this is illegal,” yelled one protestor who was escorted from the room.
“We will have order in the hearing room,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told the room after a third protestor interrupted Hegseth’s remarks.
Collins added after a fourth protester interrupted proceedings: “I would ask that the Capitol Police, whose professionalism I admire, remove those who are seeking to disrupt the hearing.”
Senators opened Tuesday’s hearing on the Iran war’s costs with ample criticism for the conflict as well as the stalled careers of Black and female military officers under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth is set to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee as Republicans push a $95 billion budget package to fund the military.
Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican and committee chair, cited news reports that women and people of color are disproportionately fired or sidelined under Hegseth’s leadership, arguing that it’s “likely to discourage well qualified women and individuals of color from joining our armed forces.”
Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat, noted the war’s lack of popular support and impact on the economy as gas prices rise and economic growth slows.
The statue of a seated Jefferson currently faces the White House with its back toward the Oval Office.
The White House says it’s positioned that way because groundskeepers need to reinforce the foundation at the location where Trump wants to put the statue. After that happens, plans call for the statue of a founding father who was the third U.S. president to face the Rose Garden and the Oval Office.
The White House says it was a gift from George Lundeen, a Colorado-based bronze sculptor.
The Jefferson statue replaces one of George Washington, which was moved to another location in the Rose Garden.
Lawyers for dozens of immigrants have asked a federal judge to block the Trump administration from enforcing a policy directing the State Department to reject visa applications by citizens of 75 countries based on their nationality.
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden in Washington, D.C., didn’t rule from the bench on Tuesday after hearing arguments from attorneys for the government and roughly four dozen immigrants from the countries singled out by the January 2026 policy.
McFadden, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, appeared to be skeptical that the lawsuit’s plaintiffs have legal standing to challenge the policy. But the judge also said he sees some legal precedent to support arguments by plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys said it’s illegal for the State Department to enforce a blanket prohibition on issuing immigrant visas to nationals of the 75 designated countries.
Government lawyers say the plaintiffs haven’t shown how they’re irreparably harmed by the policy.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calls attacks on civilian infrastructure in Iran and the region, including a desalination plant and nuclear power plant under construction, “unacceptable” and a violation of international law, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Tuesday.
Attacks on vital infrastructure for civilians including hospitals and water supplies must stop immediately, the secretary-general’s spokesman said.
The secretary-general and his personal envoy, Jean Arnault, call the current situation “teetering,” and don’t want to see a return to full-scale conflict, he said.
Guterres reiterates that there is no military solution to the conflict and calls for the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and intensified efforts toward a peaceful settlement, Dujarric said.
The president told reporters he would go to Dover for the dignified transfer of U.S. soldiers killed in the Middle East over the weekend.
“They did slip something through in Jordan,” he said, appearing to refer to the deadly Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks there. “If we had other operators, you know, it would have not happened, unfortunately.”
He went on: “We’ve stopped almost everything, but when you let other people do your job with the United States — we let other people do the job — and sometimes it doesn’t work out so well.”
Trump did not elaborate on his comments, and it was not immediately clear who Trump was saying was responsible for protecting U.S. forces in Jordan. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for more information.
Discussing plans to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, Trump said the United States will soon target the area near Pickaxe Mountain — a fortified underground site near one of Iran’s primary nuclear enrichment facilities.
“We’ll be hitting that area pretty soon, and very heavily,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.
The president made the comment after being asked whether he believes Iran has moved nuclear centrifuges to the site. He said it “doesn’t mean anything” unless Iran has uranium to enrich.
“We follow the material,” he said. “That’s where the action is.”
The president is expected to attend the dignified transfer on Wednesday. It’s a ritual considered to be one of the most somber duties of the commander-in-chief.
“I’ll be going to Dover for something that I feel is — it’s a great honor for me to do it,” Trump told reporters.
Two soldiers killed in Iranian missile and drone attacks in Jordan will be returned during the dignified transfer, according to an administration official speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
The remains of another soldier killed in Iraq during a detonation of an Iranian drone will also be returned, the official said, as well as a fourth service member whose remains have not yet been identified but who is believed to be a soldier missing after the Jordan attacks.
—- Collin Binkley
Biden spokesperson T.J. Ducklo said the former president disagrees with the ruling but “respects the courts and the vital role an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy.”
“President Biden’s conversations for a book a decade ago that discussed his late son are private, and were provided to the Department of Justice on the express condition they stay that way,” Ducklo said in a statement. “Reversing course and making them public is just the latest example of this administration weaponizing the (Justice Department) for political retribution.”
Asked about his level of concern about a blockade of the Red Sea by the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, Trump suggested it wasn’t an immediate problem.
“So far, it hasn’t happened,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I think that if there is something like that, we’ll just have to take care of business.”
The Houthi-run SABA news agency said six ships were forced to reroute on Tuesday after being warned by the rebels, a day after they announced a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia.
But Trump said “we’ve had no problem with the Houthis” recently, and “they’ve had no problem with us for a long period of time, including during this conflict.”
Vice President JD Vance sat with other top administration officials for Trump’s meeting with Aoun.
Vance’s wife, second lady Usha Vance, gave birth on Sunday to the couple’s fourth child.
Alec Neel Vance is the first baby born to a sitting vice president in more than 150 years.
Days of smoke from wildfires in Canada drifting into the United States contributed to poor air quality in cities from Detroit to Washington, D.C.
“They’re not managing their forests properly. And the wind has a tendency to blow right over New York City,” said Trump, once a longtime resident of the city. “Michigan was really affected,” he added.
Asked about the issue during an Oval Office appearance with the president of Lebanon, Trump said Canada seems unable to manage the problem.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump gave a dim view on possible talks with Iran to end the war.
“I will tell you, they want to desperately meet. And until they’re ready to meet in a meaningful way, we have no interest in meeting,” Trump told reporters.
He said that in dialogue behind the scenes, Iranian officials have said “they want to meet desperately to try and end it, because they’re getting decimated.”
Iran and the U.S. have escalated attacks recently as their interim deal to end the war falls apart.
The rebels have opened a new front against Saudi Arabia by declaring a naval blockade of the kingdom, threatening the flow of global oil supplies and trade through the Red Sea.
With the Strait of Hormuz blocked, Saudi Arabia has been relying on a pipeline to the Red Sea to get millions of barrels of oil to market.
Six ships in the Red Sea were forced to reroute on Tuesday after they received warnings from the rebels, according to the Houthi-run SABA news agency.
Separately, three Houthi officials told The Associated Press that the rebel group warned international shipping companies on Monday to avoid transiting in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the gateway to the Red Sea at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
— By Jon Gambrell and Munir Ahmed
The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, is credited with saving at least 26 million lives since its inception in 2003. But it’s been impaired by the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and cuts to thousands of global health grants.
These disruptions to the global AIDS relief program have forced organizations to close clinics, lay off staff and cut services, seriously impeding efforts to prevent and treat the disease in dozens of countries, according to a report released Tuesday by amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.
Other research, published in the journal Nature Health in June, found a 10% decline in antiretroviral treatment — nearly two million fewer people living with HIV — getting the life-saving treatment through PEPFAR.
▶ Read more
The State Department has informed Congress that it plans to move ahead with the potential re-opening of the U.S. Embassy in Libya. It’s proposing to allocate nearly $41 million to restore America’s formal diplomatic presence in the North African nation.
The effort comes amid new warnings of Iranian-related attacks against U.S. facilities and interests around the world, particularly in the Middle East.
The department told lawmakers that the money would cover “a range of security-related activities associated with plans for the potential phased resumption of embassy operations in Libya.” The embassy in Tripoli was shuttered in July 2014.
The Trump administration reopened the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, Venezuela following the ouster of former President Nicolas Maduro in January and is also seeking to reopen the closed embassy in Damascus, Syria.
More gains for makers of computer chips and other winners of the artificial-intelligence boom are carrying Wall Street higher on Tuesday after tumbling the week before.
After rocketing higher because of the boom in investment in AI chips and data centers, they’ve come under pressure in recent weeks on worries that they shot too high. Concerns are also weighing that AI investments may fall off if they don’t produce as much profit and productivity as promised.
The gains came despite more climbs for oil prices, and Brent crude oil topped $90 per barrel because of continued attacks between the United States and Iran. It rose 2.2% to $91.17, up from less than $72 early this month.
The oil price hikes threaten a reacceleration of inflation, just as it was slowing more than economists expected. That in turn could push the Federal Reserve and other central banks to raise interest rates, which would slow economies and undercut prices for stocks and other investments.
▶ Read more
Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Wednesday in Manila, the State Department said.
The top diplomats from the world’s two largest economies are attending annual talks of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations this week in the Philippine capital.
The ASEAN summit comes amid unfolding crises led by renewed fighting between the U.S. and Iran as well as a violent skirmish in the disputed South China Sea.
The Rubio-Wang meeting could help set up the next sitdown between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Rubio said ahead of the summit that he expects Xi to visit the U.S. in September and that “it’s incumbent on powerful, important countries like ours to continue to talk and have a relationship.”
Secret Service Police Officer Victor Gonzales will be given a special award for exceptional service at a rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, the association said Tuesday.
Gonzales was at a security checkpoint during the April dinner when it was interrupted by a gunman who prosecutors say was trying to assassinate Trump. The Secret Service said Gonzales was struck in his protective vest as he engaged the gunman, who was tackled outside the ballroom.
“His swift and decisive actions assisted in deterring the gunman from proceeding any further,” the Secret Service said.
A make-up event being held Friday at the Waldorf Astoria hotel at Trump’s encouragement will also honor Washington Hilton hotel staff who helped guests in the aftermath.
Swinton’s wife, Mia Gonzalez-Swinton, posted on social media that she was informed of his death on Sunday. The couple have a 6-year-old son and a 4-year-old daughter.
“I will never recover from this, you should be home. We had so many plans for when you got back, I’m sick to my stomach,” she wrote in a Facebook post Monday.
The military said it was investigating the death of Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton of Fayetteville, North Carolina, during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone on Sunday at an air base in Irbil.
Swinton, 30, will get a Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Combat Action Badge, and be promoted to staff sergeant, the military said in a statement.
He enlisted in the Army in 2017, and was assigned to the 55th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 108th Air Defense Artillery Brigade, out of Fort Bragg.
Two U.S. Army soldiers were killed in Jordan on Friday while defending against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks. They were the first U.S. troop deaths from direct Iranian fire since the opening days of the war.
The landmark meeting between Joseph Aoun and Trump comes as Lebanon and Israel continue to hold rare direct talks mediated by Washington in a bid to bring about long-term calm in Lebanon after months of war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group.
Lebanon hopes the talks will lead to Israeli troops withdrawing from large swaths of southern Lebanon, and for the Lebanese military to receive support to assert full control in areas where Hezbollah militants had held sway.
Lebanon and Israel announced a “framework agreement” on June 26, setting a plan for Israeli forces to withdraw from southern Lebanon as well as the disarmament of Hezbollah.
Aoun is scheduled to arrive at the White House at 11 a.m.
Subpoenas for phone records of New York Times reporters now include the mother of one journalist and the spouses of two others as the Justice Department seeks to unmask the confidential sources of reporters who wrote about Trump’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet.
The Times’ lawyers have moved to quash the subpoenas, noting that the mother in question is a mental health professional with confidential client relationships and that one of the two spouses is the general counsel of a law firm.
The Justice Department has previously said that the reporters are not the targets of the investigation and asserted in a new legal filing Tuesday that it had followed its own protocols in issuing the subpoenas.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian is scheduled to hear arguments Thursday.
The appellate panel’s 2-1 ruling late Monday found “substantial” public interest in disclosing what former President Joe Biden wants to keep under wraps. Redactions to the recordings would help protect Biden’s privacy, the majority noted.
The judges suspended their decision until Aug. 3 to allow more time for Biden to consider another appeal.
Mark Zwonitzer, who worked with Biden on his two memoirs, interviewed the Democrat at his home in 2016 and 2017, before his presidency. Biden’s lawyers say the conversations were candid, personal and intended to remain private.
The recordings were obtained by special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents from his time as a senator from Delaware and as vice president. Republicans demanded the material after Hur declined to file charges against the then-president.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., during the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit, Wednesday, July 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
A resident inspects the damage to his home, destroyed in an Israeli airstrike during the Israel-Hezbollah war in Ghandouriyeh village, southern Lebanon, Tuesday, July 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
People cross a street in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, July 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
