But you’re going to have to look really closely to see the differences, which might make your heart hurt a little. Many have pledged to reveal data about their hiring practices and are rolling out new initiatives to improve diversity.
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Perhaps Apple thinks “diversity” is something to do with having two antennas.
Critics are especially concerned about low diversity rates among technical workers, such as computer software developers or hardware engineers, which are usually the highest-paid jobs at most Silicon Valley companies, outside top management.
Like different main tech corporations, Apple has been beneath public strain to extend the quantity of women and minorities in a workforce that’s overwhelmingly male and white or Asian.
But Reverend Jackson also encouraged companies to take diversity efforts further and become even more transparent about hiring statistics by releasing more information than just that which the federal government requires, to give “a much clearer picture of what companies are actually doing”. These are just slices of diversity-oriented programs that Apple has lent its name and time to – CODE2040 is another that comes to mind.
To be fair Apple is trying to do something about it, so the Tame Apple Press is talking up that.
“This represents the largest group of employees we’ve ever hired from underrepresented groups in a single year” including 11,000 women, Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in a letter that accompanied the report. The numbers certainly don’t show it. Apple’s gender split stands at 69% males, and 31% females, now. The percentage of women grew from 23.5 percent in December to 24.1 percent in July, while those in leadership roles increased from 15.4 percent to 17.1 percent.
Within the next few decades, white Americans will be in the minority in terms of racial and ethnic background, and there are slightly more women across the world than there are men.
According to an Equal Opportunity Employment (EEO-1) report filed for 2014 sixty of the eighty-three people on Apple’s leadership team were white men. It broke the US numbers down further, saying that in the nation it hired in excess of 2,200 black employees, a 50-percent increase over 2014. I believe the next innovation in tech PR must be human-focused, only then will we see a cultural renaissance that will result in truly unbelievable technological accomplishments fueled by human innovation.
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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.
