Saturday, May 16, 2015

Fact Checking an EEO Officer's Claim

Click here to download a pdf version of this article (tagged for screen readers).


On March 19, 2014 at about 1:45 PM the Equal Employment Officer (EEO) of one of the 10 largest California state departments held a closed door meeting with managers.  During that meeting he stated:

"Most of the claims filed with my office are not discrimination... Nationally about 3-5% of these types of claims are proven."

We can fact check this claim using data supplied by the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (U.S. EEOC), for the years 1997 to 2014 (available here).  The U.S. EEOC classifies closed cases one of eight ways as listed below in the table (click here for full definitions, click here to retrieve a spreadsheet used to conduct the calculations summarized in the table below).

Category
Favors
SUM, 1997-2014
Settlements
Employee
143,976
Withdrawals w/Benefits
Employee
78,258
Administrative Closures
Ambiguous
321,540
No Reasonable Cause
Employer
1,030,567
Reasonable Cause
Employee
87,795
Successful Conciliations
Employee
25,679
Unsuccessful Conciliations
Employee
62,116
Merit Resolutions
Employee
310,029


0
SUM, ratable (Excludes Admin.)

1,738,420
Discrimination

40.7%
NO Discrimination

59.3%


Of the 1.7 million cases investigated by the U.S. EEOC between 1997 and 2014, almost 41% either found discrimination occurred, or likely occurred!
  • This is ten times greater than the amount claimed by the EEO officer.
Sadly, although we can establish the magnitude of the EEO officer's error, many and perhaps all of the 20 managers who attend the meeting on March 19, 2014 left thinking nearly all claims of discrimination at their workplace are without merit.  Statistically speaking, nothing could be further from the truth.  

One can't help but wonder if closed door meetings such as this, where apparently the EEO officer is signaling his skepticism, would actually serve to embolden managerial level discrimination?  We can't rule out the possibility.  



Please cite this blog as: Nelson, Eric L. (2015).  Fact Checking an EEO Officer's Claim.  Trends in State Work, http://trendsinstatework.blogspot.com/2015/05/fact-checking-eeo-officers-claim.html