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In December 2025, Andrea Lucas, the chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, invited white men to file more sex- and race-based discrimination complaints against their employers. Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws. Contact the @USEEOC as soon as possible, she wrote in a post on X. In February 2026, the EEOC began to investigate Nike on what the agency said was suspicion of discrimination against white workers. Both initiatives followed the EEOCs March 2025 characterization of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, or DEI, as potentially discriminatory against white men. The EEOC characterization falls within the Trump administrations larger pattern of calling DEI illegal discrimination. At the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts, we have done extensive research on who files discrimination charges with the EEOC. Given the EEOCs December 2025 solicitation for white men to file discrimination complaints, we revisited our prior research to see what is known about discrimination against white people and, in particular, what is known about white and white male discrimination charges registered with the EEOC. As part of our research, the EEOC gave us access to discrimination charges submitted to the agency and state Fair Employment Practices Agencies from 2012 to 2016. By law, all U.S. employment discrimination claims must be submitted to the EEOC, or state agencies with equivalent roles, prior to any legal actions. While the EEOC has a history of sharing its data with researchers stretching back to the 1970s, the EEOC stopped sharing current and historical data with researchers in 2016. As a result, we do not have any data on discrimination complaints after 2016. Judging by the EEOCs yearly reports, the basic patterns have not changed much in the interim. White men already file complaints When we looked at all sex- and race-based discrimination charges received by the EEOC, unsurprisingly we found that men are much less likely than women to file sex-based discrimination charges. But white men do file about 10% of sex discrimination complaints. While Black, Hispanic, and Asian male employees are more likely to file racial discrimination complaints, white men file about 9% of such complaints. In the same study, when we compared legal charges filed with the EEOC to national survey data, we found that percentages submitting a legal complaint to the EEOC roughly correspond to the percentages of survey-reported experiences of discrimination at work. Together, these two findings suggest that white people generally, and white men in particular, were already filing employment discrimination charges. Second, we did a deeper dive on sexual harassment charges. We found that while white men were 46% of the labor force, they filed 11% of sexual harassment charges and 11% of all other charges, most commonly tied to disability and age. The general pattern is that, while white men already file discrimination charges, they are less likely to experience employment discrimination than other groups. The risk of filing complaints Charges filed with the EEOC can result in two types of benefits to the charging party: monetary settlements and mandated changes in workplace practices. White men who filed sexual harassment charges received some benefit 21% of the timelower than white women, at 29%. Thats also lower than Black women, at 23%, and higher than Black men, at 19%. The EEOC already receives discrimination charges from white men and, at least for sexual harassment, treats them similarly to other groups. Most people who submit a discrimination charge do so to improve their employment experience and those of their co-workers. But submitting these claims to the EEOC or a state Fair Employment Practices Agency is a high-risk, low-reward act. We found that, at least for sexual harassment, employers responded to white mens complaints in much the same way as to other groups. White men who filed sexual harassment discrimination charges lost their job 68% of the time and experienced employer retaliation at about the same rate. Retaliation can include firing but also other forms of harassment at work, such as abusive supervision and close monitoring by human resource departments. We found this pattern of employer retaliation and worker firings for all demographic groups that file any type of discrimination complaint. White men who file discrimination charges receive the same harsh treatment from their employers as any other group. Urging more white men to submit discrimination complaints based on the perceived unfairness of DEI practices, as the EEOC has done, is likely to lead to job loss and retaliation from employers. What will happen? Its possible that EEOC chair Lucas call for more discrimination charges from white men will increase the number of filings. This is exactly what happened after 2012 when the EEOC ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Acts prohibition of sex discrimination also protected LGBTQ workers from sexual-orientation and gender-identity discrimination. More concerning is the EEOC defining employer efforts to prevent discrimination and create inclusive workplaces as discrimination against white men. In the end, all workers want to be treated fairly and with respect. Employer efforts to create such workplaces should be supported. It would be a better use of EEOC resources to support companies efforts to create such workplaces. Donald T. Tomaskovic-Devey is a professor of sociology and director of the Center for Employment Equity at UMass Amherst. Steven Boutcher is an associate professor of social science research at UMass Amherst. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Figmas fourth-quarter earnings report arrived on Wednesday afternoon with a notable claim from one of its top executives: AI should complement, not replace, employees. Its a bold statement from the leader of a tech company at a moment when many are scaling back. We don’t see it as a tool that replaces our talent, but rather how can we augment the team that we already have, Figma CFO Praveer Melwani said during Figma’s earnings call. So we will continue to hire, but we will be able to complement that with efficiency gained by some of the tools out there as well. The comment came in response to an analysts question about how AI might impact Figmas research and development. Figma is enjoying better-than-expected growth According to Figmas fourth-quarter earnings report, the strategy just might be working. The company reached $303.8 million in revenue, a 40% increase year over year. It also beat Wall Streets expectation of $293.15 million, according to consensus estimates cited by CNBC. Figma further predicts that it will reach $315 to $317 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2026. This result would bring an average of 38% year-over-year growth. In response, shares of Figma Inc. (NYSE: FIG) rose over 16% in after-hours trading. By midday Thursday, the stock’s price was still up almost 8%. Software companies have faced falling stocks amid AI fears Melwanis call to not overly rely on AI tools comes as the company has faced sliding share prices around that very topic, with investors growing worried about the impact of AI tools on software platforms. Figma opened at $85 per share during its IPO last July, reaching over $115 on its first day. However, it started a mostly downward trajectory soon after. February has seen Figmas shares hover in the low- to mid-$20sfalling more than 79% since that first day and over 35% year to date. Artificial intelligence plays a significant part in Figmas offerings. The company launched Figma Make last year, a prompt tool with AI-powered design capabilities, along with a range of AI features. Figma offers AI credits based on each users plan and will allow the purchase of additional credits starting March 11. Teams can track their credit usage in a shared billing dashboard.
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday invited leaders of some of the top artificial intelligence companies to gather on stage as part of a commitment to build more inclusive and multilingual AI around the world. And they did. But what caught some of the audience’s attention, and later went viral on social media, was an awkward interaction between two rival tech leaders: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Modi, host of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, clasped hands with those closest to him Altman to his left and Google CEO Sundar Pichai to his right and beckoned all 13 tech leaders to lift their hands up in a chain, like theater actors at the end of a show. Everyone was holding hands except for Altman and Amodei, who stood next to each other but for several seconds awkwardly avoided hand contact. Both eventually put up their fists instead. The interaction quickly became a visual symbol of the deep rivalries in the AI industry, particularly between OpenAI and Anthropic, though Altman sought to brush off any deeper meaning. I didn’t know what was happening, Altman later said in a video interview with Indian media outlet Moneycontrol. He said he was confused, like when (Modi) grabbed my hand and put it up, and I just wasnt sure what we were supposed to be doing. Anthropic declined to comment. The two AI developers have a history, one that predates the creation of OpenAI’s hit product, ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s competing chatbot Claude. Amodei worked at OpenAI before he and a group that included his sister, Daniela Amodei, quit to form Anthropic in 2021. The newer company promised a clearer focus on the safety of the better-than-human technology called artificial general intelligence that both San Francisco firms aim to build. OpenAI first released ChatGPT in late 2022, revealing the huge commercial potential of AI large language models that could help write emails and computer code and answer questions. Anthropic followed with its first version of Claude in 2023. Their different approaches spilled over into public debate earlier this month in the United States when Anthropic aired TV commercials during the Super Bowl that ridiculed OpenAI for the digital advertising its beginning to place in free and cheaper versions of ChatGPT. While Anthropic has centered its revenue model on selling Claude to other businesses, OpenAI has opened the doors to ads as a way of making money from the hundreds of millions of consumers who get ChatGPT for free. Altman took to social media to criticize the TV commercials as dishonest. Sheikh Saaliq and Matt O’Brien, Associated Press
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