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Apple reports little progress in workforce diversity efforts

In case you didn’t know, Apple has pledged to take diversity seriously.

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That’s the bottom line from Apple’s diversity report released Thursday.

Though Apple made progress in hiring more diverse employees, it failed to improve diversity among its top brass.

“At Apple, we rely on our employees’ diverse backgrounds and perspectives to spark innovation”. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., last week also called on Apple and other technology holdouts to produce the data.

But Apple, one of the most valuable public companies in the world, said it was making progress in its diversity efforts.

One area that Intel is slightly behind on is spending on diverse-owned businesses in its supply chain.

The Apple diversity statistics show very slight improvements on last year in terms of the race, gender and ethnic makeup of the company.

So Apple is talking the talk pretty well, and it is trying to walk the walk. In the past year its new global hires are 35 percent women and in the U.S. 13 percent Hispanic and 11 percent Black, according to its diversity report.

Nevertheless, he noted that “there is a lot more work to be done” to enhance the company’s staff diversity. Despite hiring more women than ever this year, female employees still count for three of every 10 employees overall.

Women are also underpresented, especially among tech workers.

The chip maker kept a target of 40% for the representation of women and minorities for the current year. Changes reflected about 7 months later were not significant with a.01% increase for Blacks and percentages that stayed the same for Hispanic and Native American groups.

The number of white and Asian technical workers at Apple also increased from 77 percent last year to 78 percent this year. Apple doesn’t state what those figures were at last year, but it’s likely that they’ve grown.

As for its retail leadership in the U.S., 69 percent are white, nine percent are Hispanic and five percent are Asian and African American. In its latest diversity report, the company admits “it’s clear to all of us that we still aren’t where we want to be”, and said “We remain deeply committed to building a workplace that reflects a broad range of experience, thought, geography, age, background, gender, sexual orientation, language, culture and many other characteristics”. “We see both”. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson has been joined by members of Congress and other critics calling for Silicon Valley firms to make their employees more representative of the population as a whole.

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The graph above shows Apple’s updated total workforce diversity numbers. Prove that they’re worthy of displaying their hard work.

Jacob Lund  Shutterstock