When we spoke to Cook in June about diversity at Apple, he stressed his commitment to continuing to make Apple and its community a more diverse place.
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The company had, until now, refused to publish any of its EEO-1 reports despite the Rev Jesse Jackson, president of the Rainbow/Push Coalition, making a personal appeal to Apple CEO Tim Cook to do so at the company’s shareholder meeting.
The fact that tech companies are releasing this data is making Silicon Valley’s gender and ethnicity imbalance much more apparent.
Up to now, a major question about Apple’s workforce demographics has been how does the diversity of the main company compare to workers in its retail stores. Apple’s global gender split is now 69% male and 31% female, a marginal change from last year’s 70% male-30% female split. The report showed a one percent decrease in the percentage of white people at the company from 54 percent to 53 percent. Although most of the companies only started disclosing their reports at the urging of others, Intel has been releasing these reports for roughly 10 years. Mark Zuckerberg’s company hired 36 black employees last year out of a total headcount increase of 1,216.
In the last 12 months, Apple revealed that it hired (across the globe) 11,000 women, which is a 65-percent increase over 2014. “We aspire to do extra than simply make our firm as numerous because the expertise obtainable to rent”. Further putting his own money on the line, he said that he would tie executive compensation to the progress on building a more diverse work force.
Little has changed since, with Facebook announcing the share of Hispanic employees in the United States remained at 4 percent, just as it did for black employees at 2 percent.
In one other key class, Apple stated the quantity of whites in US-based mostly management positions dropped to sixty three% from sixty four%, however the numbers of Asians, Hispanics and blacks stayed the identical at 21%, 6% and 3%, respectively.
The lack of women and minorities in Silicon Valley has become a hot-button issue in the male-dominated technology industry. The initial case, Apple versus Samsung, required the Korean tech giant to pay Apple no less than $548 million in damages for patent infringements.
OpenNews director and Source editor Erin Kissane has suggested employers can attract more applications from women by tweaking the wording of job descriptions to appear more inclusive.
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“We have made critical progress in increasing our hiring of under-represented populations”.
