Mike Peterson
An informal Apple pay equity survey organized by one of the company's software engineers shows a 6% wage gap between the salaries of men and women.
The survey was started by Cher Scarlett, who created it outside of Apple's purview after the company squashed a series of other pay equity surveys. At the time, Apple said the surveys weren't allowed because they collect sensitive information.
Early results for Scarlett's survey analyzed by The Verge suggest that the wage gap between men and women at Apple remains around 6%. That's about the same as the average in the San Francisco Bay Area, which hovers around 5%.
The results of the survey shouldn't be considered scientific — only about 2,000 people responded to it on an opt-in basis. However, Apple has claimed that it is working toward achieving pay equity within its ranks. Back in 2016, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that women at Apple made 99.6 cents on the dollar, and underrepresented groups made 99.7 cents on the dollar.
"We know pay equity was a problem in the past and Apple did something to fix it, but we're having this conversation again because we're seeing gaps in certain areas of the company and we want to know what Apple will do to prevent it from happening year-over-year," Scarlett told The Verge.
Some of the other findings included the fact that there were fewer women, non-binary employees, and non-white people in technical roles or senior positions at the company — two places that often see higher salaries.
The Apple software engineer and a small team of the company's data analysis group will soon present the findings to Apple. Earlier in August, a source within Apple told The Verge that ad director at the company discouraged staffers from taking the survey.
The Verge, which was granted access to the survey data, came up with the findings by isolating the 1,400 technical roles and grouping them by job level, gender, and race. It then found the median salaries for the job level and parsed the data from there.
In a request for comment, an Apple spokesperson sent The Verge the company's boilerplate public statement on pay equity.
"Apple has a firm and longstanding commitment to pay equity. Globally, employees of all genders earn the same when engaging in similar work with comparable experience and performance," the statement reads. "In the United States, the same is true for employees of all races and ethnicities. We don't ask for salary history during the recruiting process. Our recruiters base offers on Apple employees in similar roles. And every year, we examine the compensation employees receive and ensure that we maintain pay equity."
Amber Neely
Andrew Orr
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
22 Comments
I think the wage gap is more related to job type, which certain groups of people tend to like that job type more than others, than gender, people always trying to make an eye-catching title
Same pay for lesser performance? More pay for above average performance, male or female? Or equal pay regardless of performance, male or female?
ABSOLUTELY PATHETIC.
This “wage gap” myth just won’t die!! It’s been debunked since the 1970s.
Google did an audit because of stupid feminists claiming females get paid less because they have a vagina. We’ll surprise! They found women were getting paid MORE and adjusted the pay with bonuses for the men who were paid less for the same work!! 😆
The minimum wage is the same whether you’re female or male. If females got paid less by default, males would be out of work!!
The pay gap has been debunked since the 1970s. Because of this, now the narrative of feminists is demanding MORE pay for THE SAME work or less for females. It’s a never-ending ladder of entitlement.
For example, they compare the pay of male CEOs to a bottom position of a female out of college.
The entire concept of "pay equity" is worrisome to me. In my 40 odd years of working in a variety of jobs at a variety of organizations I cannot recall a single instance of two people doing the same (level of) work.
When working assembly, some people worked faster and some performed their work more accurately - although the argument could be made they were performing the "same job". When doing design work it was the same affair with some people clearly outperforming their peers either in quantity or quality of work (and sometimes both). During my time in the military it was, again, the same although the gap between performance was even greater with some higher paid personnel doing less or inferior work than that of their lower paid counterpart.
All that said, I have yet to meet a single employee who felt they were overpaid or even paid enough. In my experience employees invariably overrate their work and contributions while griping about their pay. With the exception of the military the salaries of my contemporaries were not known to me, nor should they have been. With the exception of my time in the military, when I felt my compensation was insufficient, I went to the boss and told him so... as everybody has the right to do. If you do not receive the response you desire, you always have the option of finding another job.