{"id":386484,"date":"2018-11-25T11:36:15","date_gmt":"2018-11-25T10:36:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-government-has-reversed-its-policy-on-silicon-valley-diversity-data\/"},"modified":"2018-11-25T11:36:15","modified_gmt":"2018-11-25T10:36:15","slug":"the-government-has-reversed-its-policy-on-silicon-valley-diversity-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-government-has-reversed-its-policy-on-silicon-valley-diversity-data\/","title":{"rendered":"The Government Has Reversed Its Policy on Silicon Valley Diversity Data"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org<\/a> and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org\/podcast<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Federal labor officials have decided to reverse their longtime policy and release diversity numbers for government contractors such as Oracle and Palantir Technologies in response to a lawsuit filed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.<\/p>\n

Reveal submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for the workplace statistics of those and other tech companies as part of a project analyzing<\/a> the lack of diversity<\/a> in Silicon Valley. We requested the companies\u2019 official EEO-1 reports, which show the race and gender numbers for total US employees grouped by broad job categories.<\/p>\n

But five companies \u2013 Oracle, Palantir, Pandora Media, Gilead Sciences and Splunk \u2013 objected to the requests, claiming that the diversity data is a trade secret. In each case, the US Department of Labor initially agreed<\/a> with the companies and denied Reveal\u2019s FOIA requests.<\/p>\n

For many years, the Labor Department has allowed federal contractors to block public records requests for their demographics by calling them trade secrets.<\/p>\n

We filed a lawsuit<\/a> in April, alleging that the Labor Department was violating the Freedom of Information Act. The lawsuit calls the trade secret argument unjustified and asks for an injunction requiring the Labor Department to \u201cpromptly release the withheld records.\u201d<\/p>\n

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On Oct. 30, the Labor Department notified<\/a> the five government contractors that it would disclose their diversity numbers over their objections. Citing the lawsuit, the Labor Department\u2019s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs told the companies that it has \u201cundertaken a supplemental review\u201d and \u201cwill initiate…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org\/podcast. Federal labor officials have decided to reverse their longtime policy and release diversity numbers for government […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-386484","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}