AppleInsider Staff
Efforts by Apple to improve recruitment of women and minorities in its workforce are slowly paying off, the company has revealed, as it hopes other corporations will follow its lead in diversity and transparency.
The company is planning to release its next diversity report this summer, but before then, human resources chief Denise Young Smith spoke with Fortune about the progress the company has made. She revealed that about 35 percent of Apple's recruits are currently women, and that hiring of African-Americans and Hispanics has increased.
In comparison, a year ago, Apple's overall employee base was 70 percent male, 30 percent female, revealing that new recruiting efforts are beginning to tip the balance slightly.
The progress comes a year after Apple pledged to give more details on the diversity of its workforce. The company's current workforce is overwhelmingly male and white — Â something that Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook has said must be improved.
"All around the world, our team at Apple is united in the belief that being different makes us better," Cook wrote in a letter to employees last year. "We know that each generation has a responsibility to build upon the gains of the past, expanding the rights and freedoms we enjoy to the many who are still striving for justice."
The company has also backed those efforts financially, investing more than $50 million into a number of nonprofit organizations intended to increase the presence of women, minorities and veterans working in the technology industry. Among the organizations supported are the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and the National Center for Women and Information Technology.
Smith previously served as Apple's VP of Global Retail Stores, but she began working in retail as the company began its storefront efforts in 2000, when she was recruited to head retail human resources.
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56 Comments
I am still waiting to see how Apple and other companies are going to make minorities who are not intersted in being an Engineer or any kind or sort into an engineer of some kind. You can not hire what does not exist today. What this sounds like is Apple is targeting those few individual who fall into the minority category which also happen to be an engineer and hiring them away from other companies.
This is a 14th amendment civil rights violation against white males. You can't hire someone based on their skin color or gender.
I am still waiting to see how Apple and other companies are going to make minorities who are not intersted in being an Engineer or any kind or sort into an engineer of some kind. You can not hire what does not exist today. What this sounds like is Apple is targeting those few individual who fall into the minority category which also happen to be an engineer and hiring them away from other companies.
Half of the planet are indian programmers; Google, MS, Oracle etc. have many principals who are indian. I only know Apple employees by the keynotes/presentations they do, and they're mighty WHITE and MALE. Last keynote was the first time I recall seeing females. As a corporate entity, they SEEM not to have many minorities, based on their public face. As for women in tech in general, girls will enter comp sci courses if they find them interesting. In the workplace, women have to deal with the quota of asinine dufuses that inhabit most tech startups like anyone else.
If I walk into an Apple store, I don't give a crap about what color the salesperson is, I don't give a crap about what sex they are, all I care about is that they are knowledgeable, polite and can quickly assist me with whatever it is that I am there for. I don't want some clueless person who has less than 1/10 the knowledge that I have about Apple and their products, and they're there because of their sex or race for example.
It should be about qualifications and skill 100%, not any BS sex, or any BS race factoring into the picture.
I don't want the ratio to eventually be 50 male/50 female. That shouldn't be the goal, and I hope that it's not. I want it to be whatever it is, based solely on the skills and qualifications. If it were 80/20, I'd be totally fine with that. If it were 99/1, I'd be fine with that too. May the job go to the most qualified.
Do you think the EEOC will investigate if white males say they are being discriminated against? Two protected classes here, sex and race. I hope their transparency comes back to bite them in the arse when they face lawsuits from whites and/or men when it becomes clear that those are decisions in the hiring process. It's supposed to work both ways. We'll see.