Agency Strategy to Advance the Use of Evidence in Decision Making
EEOC is committed to building our capacity to provide viable evidence and better integrate our information and data policy into budget, performance, and management decision-making. As a basis for this emphasis, we are guided by the agency’s Strategic Plan and its prioritization across EEOC’s long-term strategic goals and objectives. Those efforts are further reinforced by the administrative focus on the six priority areas detailed in the agency’s Strategic Enforcement Plan (SEP), which was adopted by the agency in December 2012 in response to the Strategic Plan’s first objective of “Combating employment discrimination through strategic law enforcement”.
The combined strategies will further develop EEOC’s capacity to use evidence, evaluation, and data tools to improve program outcomes.
Recent Progress
The agency has promoted, and continues to promote, the use and value of harnessing empirical research findings from the social and behavioral sciences in order to implement efficient and effective low-cost approaches to improving program results. We have collaborated with academic experts, including using externally funded no cost Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) agreements, to receive conceptual advice on cutting-edge research findings that should inform how policies are designed.
Specifically, EEOC has used IPA agreements to provide our employer survey and charge data to academic researchers, who have published a number of articles in leading journals. In May of 2014, the headquarters Office of Research, Information and Planning hosted its first EEO DATANet Conference – Building Community and Capacity Programs. EEOC staff jointly sponsored the conference funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation's Building Data Capacity Program via a grant to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This project accomplished two tasks. The first step was to create an interdisciplinary social science network to advance organizational-level analyses of employment dynamics. The second was to create a mechanism plan for allowing access to EEOC data while maintaining its statutorily required confidentiality. The overall goal was to provide large scale data capacity and access to future generations of scientists and policy makers, with information spillovers to citizens and
employers.
A second EEO DATANET conference – Building an Interdisciplinary Equal Employment Opportunity Research Network and Data Capacity – was held on May 14-15, 2015, which included a focus on longitudinal data in recognition of the Commission’s 50th Anniversary; as well as a special panel addressing research using EEO-4 data to examine diversity in police departments and general research examining best practices conducted by researchers, and research that has been completed concerning the identification of best practices.
To commemorate the 50th Anniversary of EEOC, a special report, American Experiences versus American Expectations, was released. It illustrates the significant changes to the demographics of the workforce since EEOC’s inception in 1965, as well as the continuing challenges to equal opportunity in employment.
The research network will continue to collaborate in the development and scientific use of data collected by EEOC. Since 1966, EEOC has collected panel data on employment patterns from private sector workplaces, referral unions, state and local governments, and elementary and secondary schools. Collectively, these represent the largest and longest collection of
organizational panel datasets in the world and are an extraordinary source of data for scientific and policy studies of organizational employment dynamics.
A Final Report: To Conduct a Pilot Study for How Compensation Earning Data Could Be Collected from Employers on EEOC’s Survey Collection Systems (EEO-1, EEO-4, and EEO-5 Survey Report) and Develop Burden Cost Estimates for Both EEOC and Respondents for Each of EEOC Surveys (EEO-1, EEO-4, and EEO-5) was issued in September 2015. The report details the results of the agency’s pilot pay study to evaluate the most efficient means of collecting compensation data from employers and the associative costs. The 2014 pilot was one of three recommendations resulting from EEOC-commissioned study conducted by the National
Academy of Sciences (NAS) on Collecting Compensation Data from Employers. NAS released the final study on August 15, 2012.
The Commission approved a Research and Data Plan in September 2015 – as set forth by the SEP. It is a multi-year research plan that identifies research needs for the SEP priority areas and includes an integrated approach for working with all offices within the agency. It includes, but is not limited to, the need for: 1) an EEOC program data inventory, 2) the creation of an annual Integrated Mission System (IMS) charge database extract that can be used to post on Data.gov and other agency reporting; 3) additional data collection; 4) research addressing the following issues: immigrant, migrant and vulnerable workers; harassment; hiring and recruitment practices; equal pay’ assessing emerging trends; access to protection provided in the statues EEOC enforces; and the development of EEOC performance measurement standards.
The Plan was developed by an advisory group of EEOC staff and academic researchers. A number of data and research proposals were developed by the group and were prioritized based on agency resources and other administrative considerations.
Current Barriers
The critical barriers to expanding the integration of EEOC’s information and data policy into budget, performance, and management decision-making continues to be a lack of resources and staff capacity to: 1) negotiate new contracts with outside academics and vendors that specialize in data collection and analyses; and 2) analyze data once received. Moreover, increased demand for investigative support work has also limited our ability to conduct these complex studies. In addition, there is currently a lack of identified and secured funding streams to support newly directed program evaluations that would increase the agency’s ability to build and use evidence for additional statistical purposes. Initial steps have been taken to increase staffing with
expertise in operations research and evaluation. Funding availability is pending.
II. Top priority proposals
EEOC is considering several top priority evaluation proposals that may be conducted in fiscal year 2017.