AT&T and Black America · Sep 26, 2026AT&T and Black America, Part 9: AT&T’s Own Numbers, and Their Limits

Special Series · AT&T and Black America, Part 9 of 12 · September 19, 2026

Unlike the era Parts 1 through 4 covered, when this series found no surviving written company policy on race, AT&T today publishes its own detailed workforce demographic data every year — in a standardized federal report every company of its size has to file. This installment covers the EEO-1 report: what it is, why it exists, and what AT&T’s own numbers say about the company today compared with the numbers Parts 1 through 8 documented.

Key Facts

• The EEO-1 is a federal report the EEOC requires from private employers with 100 or more employees, breaking down the workforce by race, sex, and job category — the direct descendant of the enforcement authority Part 5 covered.^[1]
• AT&T now publishes its own consolidated EEO-1 report publicly, rather than only filing it privately with the federal government.^[2]
• By AT&T’s own reporting, people of color made up 48.7% of its U.S. workforce in 2022, and women made up 31% of its global workforce.^[2]
• Academic research on EEO-1 disclosure more broadly has found that public workforce-diversity data can differ meaningfully from what a company’s own marketing communicates about itself.^[3]

The Story So Far

The gap Part 8 identified — no continuous, comparable data connecting AT&T’s pre-1984 numbers to what came after — is not fully closed by anything in this part either. What changed by the 2000s and 2010s is that AT&T began treating its own workforce demographics as something to publish and defend, rather than something a federal consent decree had to force into the open, the way it was in 1973.

What the EEO-1 Actually Is

The EEO-1 report is not a public relations document. It’s a mandatory federal filing, required annually of private employers with 100 or more employees, breaking the workforce down by ten job categories crossed with race and sex.^[1] Every company this series has discussed since Part 5 has had to file one. What’s changed is that some large companies, AT&T among them, now publish their own filing voluntarily, rather than treating it as a private submission the public would otherwise never see.

What AT&T’s Own Numbers Say

By AT&T’s own published figures, people of color made up 48.7% of the company’s domestic U.S. workforce in 2022, and women made up 31% of its global workforce.^[2] Compare that to the numbers this series has already documented: 0.7% Black employment in 1930 (Part 1), a tenfold-but-still-small increase in Black women operators by 1950 (Part 3), and a near-doubling of minority management representation to 8.7% by 1979 (Part 7). Whatever else is true about the numbers in between, the top-line composition of AT&T’s workforce today looks nothing like the company Parts 1 through 4 documented.

What’s Disputed or Unconfirmed

This piece could not directly access AT&T’s own EEO-1 PDF report to verify the 48.7%/31% figures against the underlying filing itself — the company’s own site blocked automated access when this piece attempted to retrieve it, so these numbers are cited from AT&T’s own reporting as described by secondary sources, not independently verified against the primary document page by page. Separately, a top-line “people of color” percentage combines many distinct racial and ethnic categories into one figure; it does not by itself show whether Black employees specifically — the group this entire series has tracked — are represented proportionally, overrepresented in lower job categories, or underrepresented in senior ones. Part 10 will need to look at the EEO-1’s actual category-by-category breakdown, not just the top-line number, to answer that.

How to Verify This Yourself

• The EEOC’s own explanation of what the EEO-1 report requires: eeoc.gov.
• AT&T’s own diversity, equity, and inclusion sustainability reporting page: sustainability.att.com.
• Academic research on what EEO-1 disclosure does and doesn’t reveal about a company’s actual workforce composition: Management Science, INFORMS.

What You Can Do Right Now

• Try accessing AT&T’s own EEO-1 PDF directly — if it loads for you, you’ll have verified something this piece explicitly could not.
• Compare a company’s voluntary diversity messaging against its actual EEO-1 filing, where available; the academic research linked above documents real cases where the two diverge.
• Follow this series for Part 10, which looks specifically at where the numbers stand today for the group this series has tracked from the start.

Kemetic Minds Analysis

There’s a real irony worth naming: this series spent Part 2 explaining that no written Bell System policy on race survives from the early 1900s, likely because the company never needed one. Today, AT&T publishes detailed workforce demographics voluntarily, as a matter of public reporting practice. That’s genuine progress in transparency, and it shouldn’t be waved away. But transparency about a number and improvement in what the number actually measures are two different things, and a 48.7%-people-of-color top-line figure doesn’t tell you whether Black employees specifically are in entry-level roles or in the C-suite.

The academic research on EEO-1 disclosure cited above exists precisely because companies have learned that publishing a favorable top-line number is not the same thing as being accountable for what’s underneath it. This series isn’t accusing AT&T of that specifically — this piece doesn’t have the category-by-category data to make that charge. It’s naming the general pattern so Part 10 can actually test it against real numbers rather than take a percentage at face value.

References

1. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Employer Information Report EEO-1 (Standard Form 100) [Primary, federal reporting requirement]. eeoc.gov. ↩
2. AT&T. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Sustainability Reporting [Primary, company’s own reporting, figures not independently verified against the underlying PDF]. sustainability.att.com. ↩
3. Pubsonline INFORMS, Management Science. Behind the Curtain of Workforce Diversity: Evidence from EEO-1 Reports [Secondary, peer-reviewed academic research]. pubsonline.informs.org. ↩

Related Reading

• Kemetic Minds: AT&T and Black America, Part 8.
• Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance: “Workforce Diversity Data Disclosure”.

Investigative methodology: the EEO-1 report’s federal requirements are drawn directly from the EEOC’s own page. AT&T’s specific 2022 figures are cited from the company’s own reporting as relayed by secondary sources, since this piece could not independently retrieve AT&T’s own PDF — that limitation is stated directly in “What’s Disputed or Unconfirmed” rather than presented as independently verified. The “Kemetic Minds Analysis” section is this newsroom’s own interpretation, clearly separated from the sourced reporting above it.

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