Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives

On Tuesday, January 28, 2025, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a statement titled “Removing Gender Ideology and Restoring the EEOC’s Role of Protecting Women in the Workplace,” marking a shift to align with the Trump administration’s Executive Order 14166 issued last week. The EEOC’s Acting Chair, Andrea Lucas, announced a renewed focus on protecting women from sexual harassment and sex-based discrimination in the workplace. According to Lucas, this shift involves rolling back certain policies from the Biden administration that focus on gender identity, emphasizing the protection of sex-based rights and the biological distinctions between men and women.

Executive Order 14166 called for federal agencies to uphold laws that protect men and women as biologically distinct sexes. It directed federal agencies to remove any policies, statements, or communications promoting gender ideology and sought to reinforce sex-based rights and accommodations, including safeguarding women’s access to single-sex spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms.

As part of her agenda, Acting Chair Lucas has taken several actions:

• Prioritizing Sex-Based Rights: Lucas has made it a priority for the EEOC to defend the biological and binary nature of sex in investigations, litigation, and compliance efforts.
• Revising Policies: The EEOC removed its “pronoun app” from Microsoft 365 profiles, ended the use of “X” gender marker on discrimination charge forms, and eliminated the “Mx.” prefix option from forms.
• Reviewing Materials for Compliance: The agency has started revising its “Know Your Rights” poster and is in the process of removing what it considers gender ideology-related content from internal and external materials.

Certain changes require a majority vote of the Commission, meaning that Acting Chair Lucas cannot unilaterally change some documents, like the 2024 Commission’s Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace. However, Acting Chair Lucas has expressed strong opposition to aspects of the Guidance that promote gender identity-based claims, particularly concerning access to sex-segregated facilities and the use of pronouns.  She argues that it is not harassment to maintain distinctions between the sexes in certain workplace settings, such as bathrooms or locker rooms, and that doing so is essential for protecting women’s safety and privacy.

We will continue to monitor developments at the EEOC as Lucas further refines her agenda.