Case study
El Dessouky Law
Covered in Forbes, The Arizona Republic, The Bloomingtonian, TownLift, Valdosta Today, Houston Defender, WND, Just the News, The Tennessean, Claims Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
States with the biggest gender pay gaps
States with the highest rates of workplace discrimination
An employment law firm needs to be the voice reporters call when a discrimination story breaks. The EEOC publishes every charge filed, by state and by type, which makes a national ranking possible and gives each state newsroom its own finding to lead on.
Where the data came from
| Source | What we took from it |
|---|---|
| Equal Employment Opportunity Commission | Every workplace discrimination charge filed in 2021, split by state and by the type of discrimination alleged |
| US Census Bureau | State population figures, used to turn raw charge counts into a comparable rate |
How we built it
- Take the EEOC's most recent full dataset of discrimination charges, covering all 50 states.
- Measure each state's total against its population and express it as charges per 100,000 people, so a populous state is not top merely for its size.
- Rank all 50, then pull the three most common types of discrimination within each state.
- That second cut is what makes the story local: a state leads on retaliation or on racial discrimination, and each newsroom gets its own angle.
What it found
Ranked by discrimination charges per 100,000 people. For scale, the bottom of the top ten, Delaware, tenth on the list, records 59.
| # | State | Rate | What made it a story |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tennessee | 79 | 5,471 charges in a year, 1,276 of them for retaliation alone |
| 2 | Arkansas | 77 | One of only two states in the top ten where racial discrimination is the most common charge |
| 3 | Georgia | 76 | 8,153 charges filed, the second highest raw total in the top ten |
| 4 | Nevada | 75 | 2,335 charges from a population of just over three million |
| 5 | Pennsylvania | 73 | 9,556 charges, the highest raw total of any state on the list |
The angles we pitched
- EEOC data: States with HIGHEST rate of workplace discrimination
- Tennessee has HIGHEST rate of workplace discrimination in America
- Pennsylvania in TOP 5: Highest rate of workplace discrimination in the US
Eighteen releases in all, a national one and then a version per state, each led by that state's own ranking.
The send
Study, angles and send figures come from the press releases and outreach records for this campaign. The articles shown below are the ones checked by hand for this site.
Where it ran
