Merck has published a sustainability report every year for 13 years. Its website still states that the company was among the first in the U.S. to disclose its EEO-1 data and that it continues to do so annually. The report that page links to contains 2023 data.
AMD, in the same year and under the same rules, still publishes a five-year history of workforce data by gender and race at every level, plus parental leave return-to-work rates, training hours and entry-level wages, and much more.
That gap — between what companies can tell investors about their workforce and what they choose to tell them — is what our 2026 Human Capital Disclosure Trends Report measures across the S&P 1500 and Russell 3000.
The headline is simple: companies are telling investors less about their people. It is not limited to DEI. We found declines across workforce demographics, board composition, employee development, turnover and pay equity. Information is also disappearing from SEC filings, and where companies still report demographics, disclosure thins sharply as you move from the overall workforce to leadership and executives.
Four findings stood out.
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1. Transparency has given back five years of gains
Human capital transparency improved steadily through 2024. Then it reversed.
The average Transparency Score for the S&P 500 fell from 46.1 in 2024 to 38.3 in 2025 and 30.5 in 2026, a decline of roughly a third in two years. The S&P 100 fell further and faster, from 53.8 to 28.8.
Every index we track now sits below its 2022 level. In the most recent year, 76.8% of S&P 100 companies scored lower than the year before. In the Russell 2000, 42.0% now score zero.
Two years ago the question was how quickly human capital reporting would improve. Today it is how much of those gains will survive.
2. “ESG” has all but disappeared from report titles
The shift is not confined to what is inside sustainability reports. Companies are changing what they call them.
Among S&P 500 companies that publish, “ESG” appeared in 35.3% of report titles in 2023. In 2026 it appears in 6.1%. “Impact” moved the other way, from 7.1% to 20.6%, and “Sustainability” now leads at 47.2%. The Russell 1000 tracks within a few points at every step.
The reports haven’t disappeared. But companies are clearly repositioning them — separating, reframing or deemphasizing topics that were packaged together under the ESG banner only a few years ago.
3. Companies kept the metrics tied to running the business
Not every workforce metric retreated at the same rate. We compared current disclosure with each metric’s previous peak to see what companies kept reporting.
Internal fill rates have retained all of their peak prevalence, while turnover, voluntary turnover and new-hire data have proved nearly as durable.
Demographic disclosure held up far less well. Workforce gender reporting has retained 78% of its peak, workforce race and ethnicity 72%, and leadership gender just 69%.
The divide is revealing. Companies largely kept the metrics tied directly to hiring, retention and operating performance. This isn’t a wholesale retreat from workforce reporting. Companies are choosing what survives.
4. Remove the requirement and the disclosure goes with it
The sharpest declines came where disclosure had been standardized.
After Nasdaq’s board diversity rule was vacated, board demographic disclosure among Nasdaq-listed companies fell from 95.6% in 2024 to 18.5% in 2026. Over the same period, NYSE-listed companies went from 62.1% to 30.2%.
Of the 1,142 Nasdaq companies that used the standardized board matrix in 2024, 65.2% no longer disclose board demographics at all. Of the 397 that still do, 80.6% have dropped the grid.
Non-board metrics show no comparable venue effect, which isolates the rule itself as the driver rather than a general change in sentiment.
EEO-1 disclosure is following the same path for the same reason. At the 2023 peak, 72.2% of the S&P 500 published a report. For report year 2024 that fell to 57.8%. For 2025 it stands at 2.4%, largely because the EEOC has not opened the collection window and most companies have nothing to post. The federal government is now moving to eliminate the requirement entirely.
That distinction matters. Companies can voluntarily disclose plenty of workforce information, but voluntary disclosure rarely produces data as consistent and comparable as a standardized framework.
The result isn’t no data. It’s different data, reported differently, in different places, by different companies — exactly what standardized disclosure was designed to avoid.
The full report covers publication timing, the seniority gradient in demographic reporting, what left the 10-K and proxy, and the companies that moved most in both directions. The accompanying 2026 Data Book includes the underlying benchmarks and five-year histories across the S&P 100, S&P 500, S&P 1500 and Russell 3000, by index and by GICS sector.
DOWNLOAD THE 2026 SUSTAINABILITY REPORT + DATA PACK
What we’re building next
A lot of you engage companies on collective bargaining and labor relations. Until now, the only number we could give you was the share of employees represented, when the company chose to report it.
Here is why counting alone doesn’t work.
Measured as incidents, Starbucks labor actions look finished: 147 in 2022, 15 in 2025. Measured as workers, almost nothing changed: roughly 6,600 participants in 2022and 6,600 in 2025. The activity consolidated into fewer, larger and longer events. A single strike beginning in November 2025 ran 96 days across 28 stores with 4,500 workers.
Underneath that: 921 NLRB representation cases across 48 states since 2021, and 572 unfair labor practice charges still open. In August, the union called the first boycott in its history.
An incident count would have told you this was over in 2024. It wasn’t.
Measuring the activity is only half the problem. The other half is figuring out which company it belongs to. Public records name the employer at the worksite, not necessarily the public-company parent. Tyson Foods, for example, has 85 domestic subsidiaries. We resolve activity through the subsidiary layer, using the same mapping behind our OSHA and employee sentiment coverage.
So we’re building the dataset differently: actions, petitions, elections, charges and bargaining notices by employer, union, site and date, weighted by workers involved and duration, with five years of history.
If labor is part of your engagement agenda, hit reply and tell us what you would want to see first. We’re still deciding what ships in version one.
In other human capital news…
- Deloitte to pay $21.5 million to settle US government probe over DEI Accounting firm Deloitte will pay $21.5 million to settle a U.S. Department of Justice probe over diversity, equity and inclusion practices, which President Donald Trump’s administration has cracked down on during his second term in office. (Reuters)
- Workforce 2026 Report: Unlocking Growth Requires Rethinking How Work Gets Done Organizations today face a growth challenge—one defined largely by workforce capacity pressure. As the study shows, nearly two-thirds (62%) of employees surveyed reported significantly heavier workloads over the past two years, and almost half (45%) say they are too busy to deliver meaningful results that contribute to growth. (Korn Ferry)
- America’s White-Collar Workers Feel Stuck in Jobs They Don’t Like Any way you slice it, prospects for desk workers are bleak. Pay gains have ebbed to the weakest level in more than five years. Employee confidence, as measured by Glassdoor, fell to a record low over the summer, and there’s little to inspire them as promotions decline, benefits get squeezed and AI anxiety spreads across offices everywhere. It’s enough to make workers up and leave, but largely, they’re not. (Bloomberg) and American Workers Have Slammed the Brakes on Switching Jobs American workers are staying put. Workers across all sectors are switching jobs about as infrequently as they were in the years when the job market was still clawing its way back from the 2008-09 financial crisis. (Wall Street Journal)
- Amazon workers on food stamps have tripled despite its record revenue The country’s largest company by revenue, has 12,346 workers on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and 11,338 relying on Medicaid. That was nearly triple the number of Amazon employees in need of federal assistance compared to 2020, when GAO conducted a similar report. (Fortune)
- Taking a Chance on Self-Employment Over a Corporate 9-to-5 Just 28 percent of workers say now is a good time to find a quality job, down from 70 percent in 2022, and they have never been more dissatisfied with their pay or their ability to get ahead. Discontented with large companies’ current version of work, those who choose self-employment are more likely to report having a “quality” job. (New York Times)
- 2026 US Workforce Trends Report: Talent Benchmarks Workforce challenges remain top of mind as employers pursue growth with constrained teams, elevated turnover and increasing pressure to adapt to new technologies (Gallagher)
- Baby Boomer executives aren’t leaving the C-suites – and that’s setting up a crisis for corporate America From Boeing to Verizon to Cracker Barrel, boards at major firms have been hiring older and even previously retired chief executives to guide them out of corporate messes. As of June, 42% of sitting CEOs were 60 or older — an “elevated” level versus historical averages (New York Post)