Automated Gatekeepers: Equal Opportunity to Jobs in the Digital Age
Charlotte Burrows
Former Chair
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Over its 250-year history, America has made real — if still incomplete — progress toward realizing its founding principles of equality and justice for all. Federal civil rights laws have been an important part of that progress, helping to expand economic opportunity for all workers. Today, the rush toward rapid adoption of AI in nearly every aspect of our lives is challenging that progress, creating a new frontier in the efforts to safeguard civil rights and ensure equal opportunity. Corporate fear of missing out on AI’s benefits has been particularly pronounced in employment, where automated systems now increasingly serve as gatekeepers to myriad job opportunities — influencing hiring, firing, evaluation, pay-setting, and other employment-related decisions. There is a better way. Employers can and must center workers’ voices and needs in the adoption of AI in their jobs.
It has been well-documented that because AI makes predictions based on historical data, it can recreate and amplify prior patterns of discrimination in high-stakes decisions affecting workers’ futures, all based on training data that encode biases.[1],[2],[3] These automated decisions disproportionately harm women, religious workers, people of color, older workers, and people with disabilities. Further, new forms of wearable AI technologies can infringe on workers’ privacy and potentially violate the Americans with Disabilities Act by collecting information that could reveal a disability. Unchecked, this rush to adopt AI systems threatens to turn back the clock on America’s hard-won progress on civil rights.
Current discussions regarding AI are limited almost exclusively to the competition for profits and the race for global AI dominance. Adjusting the focus to put workers and their voices at the center of the conversation would benefit everyone. Workers’ insights about the kinds of technology that would improve their work lives, and those that would not, are key to realizing AI’s promise of efficiency. Critically, those insights could help tech developers better understand which products will be needed over the long-term. Additionally, incorporating workers’ perspectives into their decisions could help employers better evaluate whether AI deployment will lead to measurable internal adoption and related productivity gains and avoid employment discrimination. Most importantly, allowing working people the dignity and respect of influencing the development of automated tools that will be integral to the workplace is the only way to ensure that AI technology delivers on its promise to improve our lives.
Employers that choose to adopt AI tools for key employment decisions, such as hiring and recruitment, should begin with a clear picture of the relevant business needs, what tasks the AI might perform, its impact on workers, and how the use of a particular tool can implicate obligations under civil rights laws. Because AI tools must comply with existing federal and state law. Decisions about adoption of employment-related AI should involve the organization’s attorneys, who, together with human resources personnel and internal experts who best understand operational needs, can assess how automated tools would be used and whether that use complies with civil rights laws. Although AI vendors are unlikely to reveal many proprietary details, employers should not be deterred from asking questions to evaluate AI products before investing in them. Employers that decide to adopt automated tools should evaluate how they perform using the employer’s own data and carefully monitor their effects after deployment.
Employers should also examine these tools for accessibility to people with disabilities and ensure that AI use would not gather disability-related information or family medical history about employees.[4] They also must have a clear, detailed plan to meet their obligations to provide reasonable accommodations for applicants or employees who need them for reasons related to a disability, religion, or medical conditions.
In this year of the nation’s 250th anniversary, we need a new approach to equal employment opportunity in the digital age — one that proactively aligns AI adoption with our shared values of fairness, justice, and respect for human dignity. While this will also require additional guardrails, including transparency and accountability requirements for the use of AI, replacing the current AI adoption panic with a thoughtful approach centering workers’ perspectives, and protecting their civil rights is a necessary first step.
[1] Pauline T. Kim, “Data-Driven Discrimination at Work,” William and Mary Law Review (2017), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol58/iss3/4/.
[2] Solon Barocas & Andrew D. Selbst, “Big Data’s Disparate Impact,” California Law Review (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.15779/Z38BG31.
[3] Rishi Bommasani, Sarah H. Bana, Kathleen A. Creel, Dan Jurafsky, and Percy Liang, “Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring,” The Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (May 26, 2026), https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.27371.
[4] Both employers that deploy AI and AI vendors may be liable for employment discrimination resulting from AI models. See, e.g., Mobley v. Workday, US District Court for the Northern District of California No. 3:23-cv-00770-RFL (July 12, 2024), https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/Mobley%20v%20Workday%20NDCal%20am-brf%2004-24%20sjw.pdf.
Charlotte A. Burrows served as Chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) from 2021-2025. Initially appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate as a Commissioner in 2015, she served in that role until she was designated Chair by President Biden. As Chair, she launched the EEOC’s ground-breaking Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and Algorithmic Fairness to help ensure that the use of AI in employment complies with workplace civil rights laws. Before joining the Commission, Burrows was an Associate Deputy Attorney General with the U.S. Department of Justice, providing legal advice on a variety of litigation, policy, oversight, and legislative matters. She previously served as an advisor to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, helping to pass the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, among other laws. Before working on Capitol Hill, Burrows held litigation roles in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and in private practice.