Mikey Campbell
Apple on Monday quietly released employment diversity statistics current as of July 2016, revealing high level executive and management positions are overwhelmingly filled by white males.
The results outlined in Apple's EEO-1 Federal Employer Information Report (PDF link) are largely unchanged from last year despite a very public push for diversity in the workplace. It appears progress is being made below the company's upper echelons, however.
Specifically, 73 of Apple's top 107 executives and senior officials and management are white males. Only 20 females, 15 of whom are white, fill those seats. Last year only one Hispanic or latino employee — one man — was among Apple's top ranks, a number that increased to two people this year. Another 14 senior staff members are Asian, up from 12 in 2015, while 3 are black or African American.
In the tier below, first and middle manager positions are likewise dominated by white males. Some 48 percent are white men, while another 18 percent are white women. Here, minorities have a modicum of representation, with 23 percent reported as Asian, 7 percent Hispanic or Latino, 4 percent black and 1 percent listed as multiracial. Pacific Islanders represent under 1 percent of the category.
Apple is making gains toward a more ethnically diverse workforce, however. Over the past year, net Asian hires were up by 2,455 people, while the number of Hispanic and black employees ticked up 951 and 783, respectively. The company added 226 white employees over the same period.
As it has done with previous EEO-1 reports, Apple notes statistics relayed through the required government form are inferior to its own internal metrics on diversity.
"The EEO-1 has not kept pace with changes in industry or the American workforce over the past half century. We believe the information we report elsewhere on this site is a far more accurate reflection of our progress toward diversity."
Like many Silicon Valley tech companies, Apple is facing external pressure to bring more diversity to its team, especially top-level leadership positions. To that end, the company launched an "Inclusion & Diversity" campaign lauded by top executives, the most vocal being CEO Tim Cook.
Apple also curates employment statistics for public viewing, as well as stories of select staff members, on a dedicated webpage.
Currently posted metrics show slight improvements in hiring practices as part of an overall upward trend toward a more diverse workforce. Apple says 37 percent of new global hires are female, while women account for 32 percent of the company's existing employees. In the U.S., underrepresented minorities account for 27 percent of new hires.
Further, Apple this past year identified and closed pay gaps to reach pay equity between men and women in the U.S. The company is currently analyzing salaries, bonuses and annual stock grants of employees worldwide, promising to fix any gaps that are discovered.
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38 Comments
Yes, fire all the whites! They're not eligible for anti-discrimination suits so screw them, right?
The point of diversity is:
1. introducing new, more wholistic thinking to a company, that might only be accessible through a cultural/gender/age spread
2. reenforcing that the best candidate is chosen, i.e. that diverse candidates don't have their diversity play against them, whether that is culturally based, age or gender (or a myriad of other factors.)
Now it's total crap to look at companies and say they have X% of this or Y% of that and pretend that these figures represent a meaningful summary of what diversity means. If this was a good measure then any company can create a swath of phony positions to fill with token employees - that is fabricating diversity. If Apple were interested in this they could have completed it years ago, we saw how quickly they rolled out green-power initiatives, if money alone were an issue Apple could have solved this already.
So how are they sponsoring diversity? Well other than trying harder to source new employees, Apple have been heavily investing in the next generation of "diversity" by providing training facilities and opportunities in areas where they are lacking. This is a legitimate form of diversity as it allows bona-fide intelligent individuals to be nurtured to a level where they could feasibly one day be employed by a company as demanding as apple.
As for top-level positions, they are going to be inherently harder to fill: the IT experience of the top-level positions has been predominantly available to a limited section of society - those top level positions will naturally become more diverse as IT is now significantly mainstream. Remember we're talking about people who would have started their career in IT about 30 years ago.
Hillary lost. Hopefully this identity politics idiocy goes away and American businesses can get back to hiring the best people they believe are qualified for the jobs they offer. Let people compete as qualified individuals, not checkboxes on a list or to fill a quota.
This racist identity politics is getting pretty disgusting and it should die a quick death.
You would have thought that it would have died out when we defeated the Nazis in the last century, but no, it's alive and well in 2016, in the USA, practiced and worshipped by a new kind of brownshirts. Truly deplorable people.