According to in-house data from Intel and Apple, progress is certainly being made, but as Apple CEO Tim Cook put it, “we know there is a lot more work to be done”.
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Fourteen years ago, I remember sitting at a worldwide agency conference at a top ten agency listening to The Holmes Report Founder Paul Holmes urging the industry to increase its diversity hiring.
And it’s true that, to its credit, Apple has tried to promote diversity from many angles.
Globally, Apple’s current workforce is made up of 31% women, a small increase from last year’s 30%. The number of white employees declined from 55 percent to 54 percent, while the number of Asians grew from 15 percent last year to 18 percent in 2015. 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. And in the US, he says, Apple hired more than 2,200 black employees-a 50 percent increase over last year-and 2,700 Hispanic employees, a 66 percent increase. With about 92,600 full time employees at the company in September of 2014, Apple is trying to promote the recently spurred debate at Silicon Valley to improve gender and race ratio. It may take a while to really balance out the entire company’s makeup, but publishing hiring rates and overall figures make it clear how quickly Apple is moving there. In the earliest as long as of 2015, almost 50 % of people uses were usually females, Black, Hispanic or Native American, the corporation said. “We believe the information we report elsewhere on this site is a far more accurate reflection of our progress toward diversity”.
PCR is hosing its own Women of the Year event on October 16th, celebrating leading women in the tech industry. Black employees represented 11% of the US workforce, while Asians and Hispanics constituted 19% and 13%, respectively.
“At Apple, we rely on our employees’ diverse backgrounds and perspectives to spark innovation”.
Jackson additionally cited Hewlett-Packard for taking steps that tackle considerations about company boards in Silicon Valley, which are likely to have few women and minority members. The initial case, Apple versus Samsung, required the Korean tech giant to pay Apple no less than $548 million in damages for patent infringements.
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The company added that it will begin to make the documents publicly available, but “it’s not how we measure our progress”. The company is also working to bring its products to schools serving large percentages of disadvantaged students.
