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

Re:Stupid

[sg_oneill]

In my average IT class, we started with 20% females and finished with about 5% females.

I.e. they dropped at a higher rate. Most were not obsessed with computers enough to excel.

Yeah thats not what women actually say about why the drop out. Most report getting harrassed, creeped on and treated like weird aliens, and then finally ignored when they try to participate by the males in the classes and eventually shit just gets uncomfortable for them.

Instead of guessing why women graduate outcomes are not as expected how about we actually look at the source and ask women instead of doing exactly what they complain about and ignore or deprecate their experience.

After all, what the f*** would us guys know about what its like to be a woman unless we ask.

Re:Stupid

[serviscope_minor]

I love the attempts (usually modded to insigntful) to bring excessive simplicity and pseudo-rationality to astonishingly complex situations. Ah, says the slashdotter, what we want to do is to hire the best people.

Well duh. We can agree there.

Therefore he continues all "bullshit" things (hiring quotas, affermative action) are bad and get in the way of hiring the best people. +5 insightful!

Except it's not insight, it's blindly applying over simplistic logic to complex situations. Let's try some actual science[*]:

[citation given]

For those who didn't read the quoted link, it's a rather interesting controlled study where affermative action rather interestingly actually raises the overall quality, because it increases the pool size.

[*] ironically it's common that people complain loudly about how stupid some scientists are because they confirm an "obvious" or "well known" result. The reason they do that is because it turns out that in cases like this "obvious" and "well known" things turn out to be incorrect because the world is more subtle than that. And it's impossible to tell before actually looking.