And it’s true that, to its credit, Apple has tried to promote diversity from many angles. It hired 50 percent more black employees in the US (2,200) and 66 percent more Hispanic employees in the US (2,700). Tech professionals in the U.S. are 53 percent white and 25 percent Asian. Apple’s global percentage of white employees dropped to 54% – it was 55% last year – while percentage of Black employees increased to 8% – up from 7% in 2014. Only in the past year or so have the industry’s top companies opened up about the diversity deficit in their ranks. “Others will recognize how much farther we have to go”.
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The “diversity challenge…didn’t happen overnight, so it’s not going to be changed overnight”, Denise Young Smith, Apple’s vice president of worldwide human resources, said last month during the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado.
Said CEO Tim Cook in a statement, “Diversity is critical to innovation and it is essential to Apple’s future”. Women make up 30% of its overall workforce, and just 10% of its tech employees.
Nevertheless, Cook remained steadfastly optimistic that Apple will continue to make progress in hiring more applicants who are female and come from underrepresented backgrounds. 50% of the hires made this year have been part of underrepresented groups at Apple; however, the company has yet to significantly surpass the statistics on diversity at other tech companies, like Facebook and Google. Cook says that it hired 65 percent more women during the past year than it did the year before that (for a total of 11,000 globally).
We’re in the second year of America’s big tech companies reporting their staff diversity data-and Apple just raised the ante.
The situation is more extreme in Intel’s top “leadership” positions in the US, where 82.9 percent are male and 71.3 percent Caucasian (see image below). In its disclosure, the company indicated that it was not only hiring minorities, as well as, women but their representation is also witnessing an enhancement. The company says it is focusing on how to address the retention issue with unconscious bias training and taking a hard look at its own culture, including benefits and lack of internal networks for diverse employees.
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Still, while not necessarily speaking about Intel or the other companies mentioned in this column, Rev. Jackson told USA Today last week that most companies “have been disappointingly slow” when it comes to improving diversity. At the time, Caucus Chairman Rep. G.K. Butterfield called on the companies to recruit blacks for their boards of directors.
