This week, Apple (AAPL) and Intel (INTC) were among a group of technology companies that released updated reports with data about the diversity of their employee base.
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In a USA Today interview, Krzanich confirmed an additional detail not included in the company’s own diversity report-namely, that such hiring numbers double Intel’s underrepresented hiring from 2014, which amounted to roughly 20 percent of its hires previous year.
“Diversity is critical to innovation and it is essential to Apple’s future”, Cook said in the letter.
The chip designer company isn’t be on the way to success very soon, as it is still far away from its goal of truly proportionate the US representation by 2020.
In its Inclusion & Diversity report released Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote that “Apple has always been different”, but from a gender standpoint, it’s pretty typical of its peers. Black employees represented 11% of the US workforce, while Asians and Hispanics constituted 19% and 13%, respectively. The report showed a one percent decrease in the percentage of white people at the company from 54 percent to 53 percent.
Cook maintained there was “a lot” more work to be done. Apple does have 114,000 employees, changing even a percentage is still over a thousand employees.
Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, said it’s hiring under-represented minorities at a faster pace than targeted as the company works toward increasing diversity in its workforce. Seventy-two percent of Apple’s most senior US employees (60 out of its 83) are white men (72%). Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter have all started sharing regular diversity reports.
What is also amusing is that we did a search trying to find a picture to illustrate this story and found that every one on Google gave the impression that Apple was sexually and racially balanced. Apple’s overall makeup has swayed by 1 percent in the past year, so that women now make up 31 percent of the company. It pledged in January to spend $300 million on the effort.
Jackson also cited Hewlett-Packard for taking steps that address concerns about corporate boards in Silicon Valley, which tend to have few women and minority members. Apple doesn’t state what those figures were at last year, but it’s likely that they’ve grown.
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.
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“Our goal with Intel technology is to help solve real problems and enable experiences that are truly desired by people and businesses”, he said.
