The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced that the Commission has voted unanimously to fund a statistical study with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) to conduct an independent assessment of the quality and utility of the EEO-1 Component 2 data for FY 2017 and 2018, which was collected last year as the result of a court order. The Information Quality Act requires the EEOC to assess and assure the quality and utility of data collected by the agency. In order to meet the requirements of the Information Quality Act, the assessment by CNSTAT will examine the fitness for use of the data, including the utility of pay bands in measuring pay disparities and potential statistical and analytically appropriate uses of the data. The CNSTAT assessment will also inform the EEOC’s approach to future data collections. This is not the first time CNSTAT has looked at the issue of pay data for the Commission. CNSTAT reviewed methods for measuring and collecting pay information and issued a final report, “Collecting Compensation Data from Employers,” in 2012. The current CNSTAT project began on July 1, 2020 and is anticipated to be completed by Dec. 31, 2021.
