“Apple Inc. Wednesday reported small increases in the share of women and minorities working at the tech giant, but said its most recent group of hires is considerably more diverse,” Georgia Wells reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“Apple said the share of Hispanics among its 80,000 U.S. workers grew to 12% in June, from 11% a year earlier; blacks accounted for 9% of the U.S. workforce, up from 8% a year earlier,” Wells reports. “Women are now 32% of Apple’s 125,000-person global workforce, the company said, up from 31% a year ago.”
“Apple said 37% of the employees it hired over the past year are women, compared with 32% for the overall workforce. Among new hires in the U.S., 27% are black, Hispanic, Native American or Pacific Islander, compared with 22% of its U.S. workforce. Apple said over the past three years it had hired 28,500 women globally, and 12,700 underrepresented minorities in the U.S.,” Wells reports. “The report said the share of women managers at Apple globally remained 28%. The share of U.S. managers who are black remained flat at 3%, while the share of Hispanic managers grew to 7% from 6%.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Diversity is certainly good, but getting the absolute best should remain the goal. Forced diversity carries its own set of problems. Would the group be comprised of the best-qualifed people possible or would it be designed to hit pre-defined quotas? Would some employees, consciously or unconsciously, consider certain employees, or even themselves, to be tokens meant to fill a quota? That would be a suboptimal result for all involved.
The best and desired outcome is for this to work in Apple’s favor. Truly looking at qualified people from a larger pool would result in delivering different viewpoints and new ways of looking at things and tackling problems than a more homogenized workforce would be capable of delivering.
Regardless and of course, someday it sure would be nice for everyone to just be able to evaluate a person’s potential, not measuring and tabulating superficial, meaningless things like skin color and gender.
Apple’s “Inclusion & Diversity” report can be found here.
SEE ALSO:
Apple inches toward workforce diversity – January 20, 2016
Diversity report shows Apple’s U.S. workforce still mainly white and male – January 19, 2016
Apple’s Board of Directors says a call for diversity is ‘unduly burdensome and not necessary’ – January 15, 2016
Apple leads Facebook, Intel, Cisco, Google on gender diversity among Bay Area companies – November 17, 2015
Apple’s latest diversity report shows progress – August 13, 2015
Tim Cook is ‘personally involved’ in improving diversity at Apple Inc. – July 14, 2015
Apple donates over $50 million to diversity efforts – March 10, 2015
Apple CEO Tim Cook met privately with Jesse Jackson regarding diversity – December 9, 2014
Apple adds Vice Presidents, more diversity to Executive Leadership Team – August 15, 2014
A message from Apple CEO Tim Cook on diversity – August 12, 2014
Jesse Jackson calls on Obama to scrutinize tech industry’s ‘lack of diversity’ – July 28, 2014
Tim Cook: Apple will release diversity data ‘at some point’ – July 9, 2014
Jesse Jackson targets tech’s lack of diversity; sends letter to Apple, Google, HP, others – March 19, 2014
Apple changes bylaws after facing criticism about lack of diversity on board – January 9, 2014
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
Diversity: a metric of zero value.
Normally I would agree with that assessment, because Silicon Valley is cutthroat to the core and is going to hire the best no matter what. That’s business competition at its keenest, most ruthless edge. Companies have been poaching talent from one another for years and have had to fend off lawsuits arising from predatory headhunting. Apple is as guilty as any of them. Diversity was only a word in the PR playbook for fifteen years.
But times are changing! And the importance of a diverse workforce are starting to be actually understood. Not by the general public, or by MDN, or by most of the commenters here, not yet. But they are starting to be understood by the CEOs of the businesses themselves, the very people whose feet are held to the fire if their company’s bottom line suffers. Trust the profit motive over primitive human and political biases.
There is no profit motive. There is no scientific evidence that supports the claim that diversity improves profit. It is all PC nonsense.
Sounds like Apple is hiring to fill quotas so they have something for the PR dept to use.
So sad it’s come to this.
I hope Apple hires a couple persons who espouse Wahhabism.
Nonsense. Apple is getting worse by the day.
Companies should never unfairly discriminate or be prejudiced but the goal should be to always find the absolute best employees.
If Apple wants to donate money to help disadvantaged students or whatever that’s fine.
It is truly disappointing to see comments here. The knee-jerk reaction seems to be that this reports implies that Apple is now hiring to fill a quota, rather than to get the best talent.
I don’t think that is the case. Apple has always been extremely colour-blind in its hiring, and they always sought the best talent, regardless of where it came from. While it is probably impossible to completely eradicate the geek bias that is so prevalent in the Silicon Valley, Apple has successfully trained their engineer managers to suppress that desire to hire people that “look like you” (rather than those who are best fit for the team), and this report is just showing general trends in labour force, where the talent pool is growing more and more diverse.
There is no reason why Apple would hide the fact that their work force is slowly becoming more diverse.
We should also notice that these movements are rather minuscule — 1% increase year-over-year for women, Hispanics, blacks. Not exactly a tectonic change.
That is a 1% change overall relative to their 80,000 U.S. workforce. Perhaps not “tectonic,” but certainly meaningful.
The relatively low star rating of Predrag’s post would concern me if I did not know the source of the down votes. Those down voters are full of crap.
People *are* assuming that diversity equals quota and that seeking employee diversity as a general objective necessarily means hiring less qualified workers. That would be stupid, and Apple is not stupid.
Please keep in mind that the diversity metrics are collected precisely because there has been serious and systemic prejudices in the U.S. corporate sector in the past. Things are getting better, but it is overly simplistic to think that the system will suddenly jump to “colorblind” perfection. And before you start griping about the perceived negative effects of promoting workplace diversity, I encourage you to study history from other points of view.
NOBODY here is going to bother to study history from other perspectives. They will continue to rant about unfair privilege; if they inhabit the unfavourable workforce demographic, they will complain about lack of diversity; if they inhabit the favourable workforce demographic, they will complain about diversity being shoved down their throats.
As one who has straddled both sides of the employment application sawhorse I can say that unfairness is inherent in any system of merit that is judged by humans unaware of their own biases. That is why regulations exist, to counteract the deleterious effects of inherent human bias.
To think that humans acting as agents in a bureaucracy can counteract their own biases is foolish in the extreme. Not one of us can do that on his or her own, and we scarcely trust even judges to avoid fealty to those who appointed them.
And to claim that we have no biases, that we are rational, is to fly in the face of everything we have learnt as a species in the past two hundred years. Rationality may serve science, but it also serves to excuse atrocious human behaviour.
Hey as long as they are qualified and the best candidate then right on.
Wonderful News… BUT only if it complemented some positive developments in updating Apples computer offerings (Updated MacPros, MacBook Pros, Mini etc), fixing the increasing instability of Apple’s core programs (I’m looking at you Mail and you Photos) and some love for prosumer and professional user segments. In the absence of this type of news, these announcements really mean nothing. Apple is losing ground and I say this as an Apple user since 1985 and a stockholder since 1998.