Trump's Unequal Opportunity Employment Commission Investigating Law Firms For Hiring Non-White Non-Men

Every day is Opposite Day for these people.

Mar 19, 2025

Do Trump administration officials ever get tired of acting like 14-year-old internet trolls? Clearly not! They are on a mission, it seems, to gaslight the American public by constantly insisting that up is down, down is up, and 2 + 2 = 1488.

This week, the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission made clear that it has fully abandoned its entire purpose of protecting workers from discrimination in favor of smugly pursuing the nonsense idea that policies meant to prevent discrimination are the real discrimination. EEOC (acting) Chair Andrea Lucas sent out a letter to 20 top law firms demanding information about their efforts to hire people other than straight white heterosexual cisgender men.

A press release about the letters reads:

Based on publicly available information, the letters note concerns that some firms’ employment practices, including those labeled or framed as DEI, may entail unlawful disparate treatment in terms, conditions, and privileges of employment, or unlawful limiting, segregating, and classifying based on race, sex, or other protected characteristics, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII).

These practices include things like advertising job openings in places where people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, and people with disabilities will see them, commitments to at least occasionally interview a few people who are not straight white heterosexual cisgender men, and policies meant to prevent hostile work environments.

According to people like Lucas, who are somehow not doing an absurdist satire of what a delusional bigot might think, such policies amount to discrimination against the aforestated men, who might lose out on a job should the law firm find someone else more qualified.

“The EEOC is prepared to root out discrimination anywhere it may rear its head, including in our nation’s elite law firms,” Lucas said in an official statement. “No one is above the law — and certainly not the private bar.”

A diversity survey conducted by the American Bar Association (ABA) in 2022 discovered that a mere 81 to 93 percent of equity partners across all firms were white people, as were about 70 to 90 percent of non-equity partners and 70 to 79 percent of associates. It also found that 80 percent of equity partners and 70 percent of non-equity partners were men. In 2020, the vast majority of law firms did not hire a single Native American, Pacific Islander, or LGBTQ+ person. Also, six percent of new male employees were hired as equity partners, while only two percent of new female employees were.

Curiously, at the associate level, “female attorneys were hired at a rate of 53 percent and male attorneys were hired at a rate of 47 percent.”

There have been gains since that survey was taken, but not that much.

A more recent ABA report found that although women make up 56 percent of law students and have been the majority of law students since 2016, they still make up only 42 percent of attorneys. This is partly due to the fact that the vast majority of older lawyers are men, but hiring data strongly suggests that it is far from the only factor.

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The facts do not really seem to support any kind of widespread discrimination against white male attorneys. Rather, like so many other “problems” the Trump administration is hell bent on “addressing,” this seems to be an issue that exists exclusively in the “guts” of people who feel that it must be happening. The fear, as usual, seems to be that if given equality, people of color, white women, and all LGBTQ+ people will treat straight white cisgender men the way straight white cisgender men treated them.

It should be noted that Andrea Lucas is only the acting chair of the EEOC, and will hopefully gladly step down from her position just as soon as they find a man to replace her.

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