Data is not a cure for discrimination, but it is one of the ways discrimination becomes harder to deny. When long-running federal workplace data disappears from public view, researchers, workers, journalists and advocates lose a tool for seeing patterns that no single complaint can establish on its own.

That matters to Black women because discrimination is frequently experienced as a string of individually explainable events: one promotion, one pay decision, one layoff, one department where leadership never seems to change. Aggregate data can reveal whether those “individual” outcomes form a pattern across an employer, an industry or a region.

Transparency is also a deterrent. Employers behave differently when they know disparities can be measured and compared. Removing access does not prove anyone is discriminating, but it makes scrutiny more difficult and weakens the public infrastructure around enforcement.

The argument for keeping this information available is simple: if a country says equal employment opportunity matters, it should not make inequality harder to see.