Apple's Diversity Numbers: 70% Male, 55% White

An anonymous reader writes: Apple has released a diversity report on the genders and races of its employees. As is common in the tech industry, the majority of Apple's workforce is male — only three out of 10 employees around the globe are female. Broken down, males compose 65 percent of non-tech workers, 80 percent of tech workers, and 72 percent of Apple's leadership.

According to CEO Tim Cook, he's unhappy with Apple's diversity numbers and says Apple is working to improve them: "Apple is committed to transparency, which is why we are publishing statistics about the race and gender makeup of our company. Let me say up front: As CEO, I'm not satisfied with the numbers on this page. They're not new to us, and we've been working hard for quite some time to improve them. We are making progress, and we're committed to being as innovative in advancing diversity as we are in developing our products."

Comments

Stupid

[Scareduck]

Wow, so we have quotas for Apple employees.

How about if we have quotas for awesome products?

Re:Stupid

[kbrannen]

Gotta agree that's stupid. First, you can only hire people that are available with the skills you're looking for. So if you don't have "diverse applicants", you'll never get "higher numbers".

Second, I hope he doesn't mean it, but it sounds like Cook want to be more diverse to look more politically correct. If I were a stock holder, I'd be upset. I wouldn't want him be "diverse" so he can look good; I'd want him to hire the best qualified people in a completely "blind" way. If that means 90% are male, or 80% white, or 85% female, or whatever the numbers work out to be because those were the best people to get the job done, then so be it. If the PC-crowd doesn't like it, then they need to encourage more minorities to get the required education and get qualified.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

If the PC-crowd doesn't like it, then they need to encourage more minorities to get the required education and get qualified.

Kudos for saying what needed to be said.

It's time that bullshit like hiring quotas based on sex, race, etc. are dumped for the
wasteful idiotic bullshit they are.

There is ONE thing that matters, and that is : who does the best work. If you don't think
this is true, ask yourself whether you'd rather have a semi-competent pilot flying your airliner
because the airline was forced to accept hiring quotas, or whether you'd rather have the
very best pilot available controlling the airliner on which you are a passenger.

.

Re:Stupid

[Darinbob]

This could fix things. However the people who refuse to acknowledge that the problem even exists won't be the ones to implement the fix and will probably claim it's a waste of effort, or that it's quotas in the schools.

Re:Stupid

[electrosoccertux]

If I were a stock holder, I'd be upset. I wouldn't want him be "diverse" so he can look good; I'd want him to hire the best qualified people in a completely "blind" way. If that means 90% are male, or 80% white, or 85% female, or whatever the numbers work out to be because those were the best people to get the job done, then so be it.

until you catch negative PR blitz that feminists picket and blacks boycott, which the media loves to pick up because You're Apple

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

What a crock. IT is, by definition, usually populated by shy people. Of course no one talked to the hot girl. BUT...it is just as much the hot girl's responsibility to fit in as it is for her colleagues to accept her. I imagine she did not have any typical IT interests such as computer gaming or sci-fi and so simply didn't fit in with the crowd there. IT has led the way since the 50's in diversity of availability (as opposed to diversity of numbers) because it has mostly been a MERIT based field...no matter what colour, gender, or orientation you are, if you cannot do the work then you do not qualify (and vice versa). Look at IT's connections with the Far East and India for example. Heck, my mother worked on IBM mainframes in the 60's and taught IT at college in the 70/80's. The simple truth is that since IT was born, not many women/minorities have taken it up. The ones that do generally succeed. So rather than putting quotas on hiring minorities, perhaps there should be quotas on technical education for everyone. Force everyone to take technical subjects in school so that an equal number of gender/race/orientation people are able to do the work and then the most qualified people will be hired. Putting a quota on hiring anyone simply forces companies to choose second-rate employees.

Re:Stupid

[Lumpy]

Problem is you are considered RACIST for suggesting they get a better education and not follow the ghetto culture.

Honestly today you can learn ANYTHING on your own with the internet, yet ask any inner city youth, they are discouraged from learning because it's considered "acting white"

Their own brand of racisim keeps them down.

Re:Stupid

[QuesarVII]

the kind of person who thinks there is not any inequality in access to education to begin with

There is definitely inequality in the system, but it goes both ways. As a white male born to middle income parents, I was not eligble for the vast majority of scholarships I seeked. Despite having good grades in honors/AP classes and getting a very high SAT score, I got squat.

Why? It's because so many of the scholarships were specialized to various minority groups and to females. Things like this are why I personally have a problem with education programs targetting specific groups. Equality means equality, or at least it should.

Re:Stupid

[AthanasiusKircher]

Before I respond, let me be clear: I'm NOT arguing that quotas are the best way to fix this. Nor do I necessarily think Apple even has a "problem" here -- as others have noted, hiring pools in tech jobs tend to contain a lot of men, and white people are in fact the majority of people in the U.S.

However...

There is ONE thing that matters, and that is : who does the best work.

While I agree with you to some extent, the reality is that for most of history, that has NOT been the "one thing that matters." Getting a job was not just about whether you could do the best work, but whether you "looked like" other people at the company (maybe same race, sex, whatever), whether you went to the same school that the hiring manager did, whether your dad played golf with somebody who had some "pull" in the company, etc. And because of those latter things, even people who aren't really racist per se end up hiring people who are "more like them," because the college they went to also was skewed more white than most and the golf course is almost all for male white people, etc.

I'm NOT defending quotas here or saying they are a good solution to these problems. But the reality is that "who does the best work" is often only one of many criteria that goes into screening candidates or selecting someone to hire. And even though those mechanisms may not necessarily be overtly unfair regarding race or gender (though they may be unfair in other ways), they end up reproducing a result that is balanced toward maintaining the status quo.

And that also doesn't take into account the reality that there are in fact huge numbers of actual racist and sexist people who still live and work in the U.S. It's not polite to talk about it anymore, but it doesn't mean the attitudes aren't still around -- and just because one guy on the hiring committee doesn't explicitly say, "Let's move on from these three candidates because they're black" doesn't necessarily mean he isn't harboring prejudice.

So, I think it's important to recognize that "who does the best work" is actually NOT the only (or even primary) criterion for who ultimately gets hired in many positions. Some companies may actually succeed in doing that, and I applaud them. But there are often a lot of other subjective factors at play, and some of those may have racist or sexist effects (either intentional or unintentional).

Re:Stupid

[wired_parrot]

Problem is you are considered RACIST for suggesting they get a better education and not follow the ghetto culture.

It is racist to apply broad stereotypes to a class of people. The black people applying for those Apple jobs are college graduates, most likely coming from a middle-class background. The average black applicant has as much in common with the "inner-city ghetto culture", as you call it, as the average white applicant has in common with "white trailer-park trash".

Jobs to Cook: DFIU

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> CEO Tim Cook, he's unhappy with Apple's diversity numbers and says Apple is working to improve them

(Voice of Steve Jobs): Tim. Boobie. The secret of Apple is 50% product and 50% marketing, with minimal bullshit. Please don't fuck it up.

>> we're committed to being as innovative in advancing diversity as we are in developing our products.

(Voice of Steve Jobs): Ah shit. You fucked it up.

Re:Jobs to Cook: DFIU

[Yoda222]

This goes in the 50% of marketing. If you have a diversity policy, it's a diversity policy. If you communicate over your diversity policy, it's PR.

Quick rule of thumb

[nrasch]

I always apply a quick rule of thumb to these types of items: Replace the word diversity/female/minority/whatever with the words "single white Christian male." Then read the sentence again. Does it offend and/or sound bigoted? Would it make Al Sharpton snort milk out of his nose if he read it whilst eating breakfast cereal? If not great; probably a good idea. If so, then it's just as bad/racist/slanted as if the words really were replaced with "single white Christian male."

Ex: Single white Christian male's have a higher cancer rate in lower income communities. (Yep, no problem here.)

Ex: Apple needs to hire more single white Christian males. (Derp! Issues... Al's nose hurts now...)

55% White

[Anonymous Coward]

In a nation who's population is approximately 80% White...

If every company in the united states was only 55% white employees or less, then 25% of the countries population would be unemployed.

Re:Cook needs to resign. Apple is going downhill f

[rolfwind]

Apple is still coasting on Job's set up.

It has absolutely sucked at setting up new types of products in the pipeline in the eventual saturation of the tablet market (ok, people will keep on buying phones every 2 years... well until some markets savvy up and offer a discount for bringing in existing smartphones).

Ipod sales are going down since 2009, to be expected because of the iPhone, but now also because of android.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

What happened to Apple TV since Steve died? Nothing. And it will remain nothing. Netflix and Amazon have that market tied up now.

Apple is going to wonder what happened to itself in 10 years, because I see Tim Cooke taking absolutely no chances unlike Steve. He's too conservative and too scared of fouling up but he also will never be able to hit it big. They'll keep churning out iPhones and that won't be enough for that much longer. Apple is the new Sony and it's days are numbered.

Re:Why 'diversity'?

[maliqua]

everyone doesn't.

It's just the new acceptable racism. It's the same as the old kinds of racism, socially accepted at the time.

I guess we just wait for history to decide if they're right or we're right.

Re:How about some real number?

[0123456]

Yawn.

If women really made less than men for doing the same job, why would any company ever hire men?

Oh, OK, the companies are EVIL, but they're also really stupid, right?

Re:Now it's unfair....

[ruir]

As far I have noticed, north America is headed to an apartheid in reverse if things do not change. Blacks are only 15% of population for instance, and if females truly are 5% in IT, so if you create an equal opportunity rule, you must be nuts. Than all of the white house is black nowadays. Movies irritate me, you always have to have a teacher, professor or lawyer black at least. And opening it up CNN, and having 3 black notices in the first page, including "my Kenyan marriage" makes me wonder what the fuck I am reading. Pretty soon, it will be very bad to be male and white in USA. Yep, mod me down for being unPC and rubbing the salt in the wound.

Re:Or don't be...

[jrumney]

Apple doesn't just hire computer science and technical graduates.

Re:Or don't be...

[Imrik]

How about, what's the percentage of qualified job applicants?

That's a problem we have

[Sycraft-fu]

I do IT work at a state university. As you'd expect with government institutions, we are really big on the EEOC rules and such. However, we can't force people to apply and for IT stuff, you get mostly men. Last round, it was all men. I don't mean we chose to interview all men, I mean no women applied, or if they did apply, HR filtered them out (HR does a basic "resume vs qualifications" check). Our IT group (we are only one of many IT groups on campus, there are women in other groups) is all male, at present. We had a female webmaster, however her fiance got a job in New York, so they moved there and of course she quit.

What, precisely, are we supposed to do to be more diverse? There are just not many women who seem to have the skills and wish to apply. We can't go and force people to apply, nor can we (legally or practically) say we'll waive the requirements for the job if you are a woman.

You can't hire those that don't apply.

So in terms of all this fluff up over Silicon Valley and diversity, I'd say how does their workforce numbers compare to their applicants? If in general it is the same, meaning say 30% of applicants are female and 30% of employees are female, 9% of applicants are black and 8% of employees are black, well then there probably isn't any discrimination going on. The fact that the numbers do not reflect demographics doesn't mean any discrimination on their part if they are simply not getting the applicants.

Also with regards to race, I'm not seeing why the 55% white number is problematic. According to Wikipedia, 72% of the US is white. If you count being hispanic as not being white (remember hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race) then the number is 64%. So per overall breakdown of the population, white people would be underrepresented in Apple by a fair bit.

That is also something I think people forget: The US does not have an even balance of all groups. Male/female has about a 50/50 split, but racial/ethnic groups are not nearly so even. It is still a nation dominated by fair skinned people of European ancestry, aka "white". The amount varies by state, of course, but it is quite a consistent majority.