Disclaimer: I am not an attorney, and this information should not be construed as legal advice; for guidance specific to your situation, please consult a qualified legal professional.

It’s been almost a year since my ‘17 Compliance Issues’ post, and the timing couldn’t be more on the nose for what we’re talking about today.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—the federal agency that enforces workplace civil rights—just filed a sex discrimination lawsuit against Coca-Cola Beverages Northeast tied to a company-sponsored Women’s Forum event. The EEOC says the case was prompted by a complaint from a male employee after the company held a two-day networking trip for about 250 women in September 2024 at the Mohegan Sun Casino & Resort in Connecticut.

To be clear: the allegation isn’t that discussing women’s experiences is illegal. The EEOC’s claim is that the company allegedly limited access by sex—inviting women while excluding men—in a way it argues violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The agency describes the event as employer-sponsored, with attendees allegedly paid their normal wages, excused from regular duties, and provided lodging/meals and other covered costs. And in the EEOC’s description of the harm, the agency is seeking relief for a class of excluded men—stating they experienced not only financial losses, but also “emotional pain, suffering, inconvenience, [and] mental anguish.” 

Coca-Cola Beverages Northeast has said it’s disappointed with how the EEOC handled the matter and is looking forward to “having our day in open court” to tell the full story, expecting to be vindicated.

Language note: The EEOC’s press release uses the legal term “sex discrimination” (Title VII language). I’m using that term only to accurately describe the allegation. This isn’t meant to reduce anyone’s gender identity or exclude trans and nonbinary people from the conversation.

So with the facts established, let’s get into what this means for ERG programming in real life.

Employer dollars = employer benefit framing

Here’s the part that matters if you’ve been in the ERG space for a minute: there was a long stretch of time when companies didn’t treat this kind of programming as legally delicate. ERGs existed, some were company-funded, and it mostly lived in the “good culture work” bucket.

What changed isn’t that ERGs suddenly became illegal. What changed is how formal—and resourced—most programs have become.

Once an ERG is employer-sponsored (budget, paid time, travel, leadership visibility, or even just clear organizational endorsement), it becomes easier to argue that ERG activities are connected to the “terms, conditions, or privileges of employment” under Title VII.  And in the Coca-Cola lawsuit, the EEOC is very intentionally framing the Women’s Forum as exactly that: an employer-sponsored event where attendees were excused from duties and paid their wages without using PTO. 

So no—having an ERG budget doesn’t automatically mean you’re “in trouble.” But it does mean you should design access like it matters, because when the company is funding something of real value—paid time, paid travel, special development, exclusive networking—regulators and plaintiffs are more likely to treat it as a workplace opportunity, not just an informal community moment.

That’s the line to keep in your head: informal community support is one thing. employer-funded access to opportunities is another. And most ERGs today—whether they feel informal or not—sit closer to the second category than people realize.

Content over cohort.

A legal expert quoted in the reporting put it in a way ERG leaders can actually use. David Glasgow — co-founder of NYU Law’s Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, a group that studies the legal landscape around DEI — urged organizations to shift “from cohorts to content.” 

That framing matters because it cuts through the confusion: the issue isn’t that the company hosted content that spoke to women’s experiences. The issue is that, per the lawsuit, men were not invited. In other words, the event wasn’t being treated like “a discussion anyone can attend that centers women’s lived experience.” The issue isn’t the women-centered content — it’s that, according to the EEOC, the invite list did the excluding.

So if your program wants to keep doing identity-relevant programming without handing your company an unforced error, I agree that “content over cohort” is the play: keep the topic, keep the lens, keep the lived experience centered — but stop building the door around identity.

You can be exclusive without saying “exclusive.”

The obvious warning is the one we’ve all heard by now: don’t slap “women-only” or “no allies allowed” on a company-sponsored event and expect that to be fine. That kind of explicit gating is the easiest thing to challenge.

But here’s the part people try to finesse: you can still create the same exclusion without ever writing it down.

If an employer-sponsored event is effectively “closed” because the invite list only goes to one identity group, the program can function as exclusive even if the flyer never says it. And that’s the core allegation in this case: it wasn’t the content that created the issue — it was the access. The exclusion showed up in who was invited and who wasn’t. 

That’s why I’ve said for a while that the safer design move is building ally-friendly spaces. Ally-friendly does not mean ally-focused. It means the topic and facilitation can still be centered on the community’s lived experience, while the door stays open in a way that avoids turning identity into the eligibility rule.

Because what we’re seeing here is that “we didn’t say it was exclusive” isn’t the flex people think it is when the outcome is predictable.

If you need a smaller cohort, that’s fine. Just stop using identity as the door. Better ways to filter without creating a legal eligibility trap:

This keeps the content centered while making access defensible.

Most organizations only audit what the flyer says. That’s not where the risk always lives. The risk is often in how the invite traveled.

Do a quick “access audit” before you hit send:

If the mechanics guarantee only one group gets in, you built an exclusive event… quietly.

Again, ally-friendly doesn’t mean ally-focused. It means your event is still centered on the community’s lived experience, but the door isn’t locked by identity.

A simple structure that works:

This is how you keep psychological safety and reduce the “gated benefit” problem.