The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) Acting Chair Andrea Lucas recently announced that the agency will be “returning to its mission of protecting women from sexual harassment and sex-based discrimination in the workplace by rolling back the Biden administration’s gender identity agenda.” Pursuant to Executive Order 14168, Acting Chair Lucas has taken the following actions to date:
Announced that one of her priorities—for compliance, investigations, and litigation—is to defend the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights, including women’s rights to single-sex spaces at work.
- Removed the agency’s “pronoun app,” a feature in employees’ Microsoft 365 profiles, which allowed an employee to opt to identify pronouns, content which then appeared alongside the employee’s display name across all Microsoft 365 platforms, including Outlook and Teams. This content was displayed both to internal and external parties with whom EEOC employees communicated.
- Ended the use of the “X” gender marker during the intake process for filing a charge of discrimination.
- Directed the modification of the charge of discrimination and related forms to remove “Mx.” from the list of prefix options.
- Commenced review of the content of EEOC’s “Know Your Rights” poster, which all covered employers are required by law to post in their workplaces.
- Removed materials promoting gender ideology on the Commission’s internal and external websites and documents, including webpages, statements, social media platforms, forms, trainings, and others. The agency’s review and removal of such materials remains ongoing. Where a publicly accessible item cannot be immediately removed or revised, a banner has been added to explain why the item has not yet been brought into compliance.
You can find more information on this topic from the EEOC here.
