Back in a former life I was a retail industry analyst. Throughout the early 2000s more than 100 retailers, including nearly all the largest US chains, released monthly reports summarizing ‘same-store’ sales, covering locations that had been open for at least a year, as well as commentary on factors driving changes such as seasonality, weather, and category/merchandise trends. While completely voluntary, it became standard practice and helped stakeholders get timely insights in between required quarterly and annual financial reporting.
In May 2009, Walmart said they would stop the practice and revert to quarterly reporting. Not surprisingly, the rest of the industry followed the largest retailer in the world and the industry fell back to quarterly reporting.
Similarly, all the large automakers that sold cars in the US used to release monthly reports summarizing sales by make and model. GM was the first to drop the practice in 2018, and by 2021 all the rest followed.
As I’ve mentioned many times before, in mid-2020 only 30 public companies publicly disclosed their EEO-1 report—the intersectional workforce data broken down by gender, race/ethnicity, and job category most companies are required to report to the government. Now, this reporting has become ubiquitous for large companies, with 97% of the S&P 100 and 82% of the S&P 500 disclosing the data.
Voluntary reporting of workforce representation data by level in non-financial reports (ESG, DEI, etc.) has become standard practice for large companies, but there is not a lot of consistency in how the information gets reported, for instance how levels of management are defined. The EEO-1 report is the gold standard when it comes to allowing for apples-to-apples comparisons across companies and industries.
Nearly every week, we have seen companies disclosing for the first time—recent first-time disclosers include Charter Communications, JLL, and Franklin Templeton.
However, several companies have disclosed this in the past but might not continue the practice in the future. GM and Nvidia last published EEO-1 data for 2021, and now those reports are no longer available for download on their sites. While they have not responded to our inquiries, I just heard from a source they no longer plan on publicly disclosing the data in the future.
I know many investors will push them to change their mind (and perhaps shareholder proposals), but if some of the largest companies in the world stop disclosing, many of their peers will no doubt feel emboldened to follow suit.
Plus, Related Articles That We’re Reading This Week
- Merit, Excellence and Intelligence: An Anti-DEI Approach Catches On (Wall Street Journal)
- Companies drop DEI targets from bonus plans on pressure from conservatives (Financial Times)
- DEI efforts may be under attack, but companies aren’t retreating from commitments (USA Today) and John Deere drops diversity initiatives, pledges to no longer join ‘social or cultural awareness parades’ (USA Today)
- The 2024 Disability Equality Index ® Reveals Strong Growth in Leadership and Accessibility but Boardroom Inclusion Lags (Business Wire)
- Managing Human Capital as an Asset vs. an Expense (Malk Partners)
- SEC Proposal on Human Capital Management Disclosure is Delayed Once Again, With Dim Prospects (Reuters)
- Corporate DEI isn’t dead. But what will it look like in 2025? (HR Executive)
- Donald Trump’s Company Has Diversity And Inclusion Policy While He Rages Against It (Yahoo! News)
- America’s HR Lobby Scraps the ‘E’ From DEI (Wall Street Journal) and When DEI gets downgraded to I&D (Axios)
- Bias in hiring, performance evaluations can derail corporate DEI goals (ESG Dive)