The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced last week that discrimination charge filings in 2007 shot up 9 percent over 2006, and pregnancy bias filings reached an all-time high. The EEOC reports that it received 82,792 complaints from private-sector workers nationwide last year, which was the highest volume since 2002 and the largest annual increase (9 percent) since the early 1990s. Almost all categories of charges went up by double digits from the prior year, and the most frequently alleged bases of discrimination were race, retaliation, and gender.
Pregnancy charges jumped a whopping 14 percent, and sexual harassment filings increased for the first time in seven years, up by 4 percent over 2006 figures. What’s more, a record 16 percent of sexual harassment charges were filed by men.
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The EEOC recovered $345 million in monetary relief for job discrimination victims in 2007, a leap of 26 percent over the prior year, and resolved 72,442 charges, 23 percent of those (a record) meritoriously. (Note that most closed charges included in the “meritorious” category were resolved voluntarily with employers, before litigation.)
To what does the EEOC attribute the increase in filings? It may be due to a combination of several factors, says the agency, including employees’ greater awareness of the equal employment opportunity laws, changes in economic conditions, increased workplace diversity, and demographic shifts in the labor force. Nevertheless, the EEOC says that “Corporate America needs to do a better job of proactively preventing discrimination and addressing complaints promptly and effectively.”