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

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

That creates a challenging pool to hire from.

Perhaps if IT people were not expected to be as obsessed and asocial as they are, it wouldn't happen.

There were zero IT parties in 4 years of collage. Heck my DND club had at least a couple parties a year.

Re:Stupid

[lisaparratt]

Or, another way of looking at it: they met their future colleagues, and bailed while the gettin' was good.

Re:Stupid

[mlk]

I come from the same camp, hire the best person for the role. Definitely.

But best is not just "technically best" but also "team fit best" and "not a dick" and "can communicate with the team" and various other little things. What this can mean is that the team unconsciously equates "best team fit" as "same as the rest of the team". The management should step in if this happens and look at ways to fixing what is a problem and reports like the one performed by Mr Apple is one quick way to measure if this is happening.

Re:Stupid

[GuB-42]

This study is interesting as it doesn't show that affirmative action itself has a positive effect. The simple knowledge that affirmative action is in place is sufficient, like some kind of placebo effect.

The idea is : women can win if they try but they don't try unless we tell them they have an unfair and in many cases unnecessary advantage.

Re:Stupid

[BitZtream]

The results of that 'study' are subjective and the study was biased from the start to show results that favor affirmative action.

Your study is bunk. It starts off by finding qualified individuals, then claims because it puts a diverse group in competition that its emulating affirmative action, which is entirely not the case.

Yes, I read the link.

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

[SecurityTheatre]

1) This study assumed an equal pool of men and women (it breaks, badly, if there is an unequal pool)
2) This study assumed or selected men and women who are very closely matched in terms of problem solving skill
3) This study simply concluded that affirmative action does not impact "the ability of the group to cooperate".

I hire for technical computer-related positions. I advertise in all the standard places, ranging from craigslist to the variety of job boards, as well as on our website. I will interview EVERY SINGLE woman who sends me a resume with even the most remote bit of experience. To contrast, I only interview about 5% of men who do.

I have hired EVERY SINGLE women who has come through the door for an interview. EVERY SINGLE ONE. (That is 3 people in the last 2 years)

I hire about 2% of men who apply. My standards for the men we hire are EXTREMELY strict.

I still hire over 80% men.

I'm not sure what kind of affirmative action would be required to rectify this, but it certainly isn't up to my HR department to go out and train more women, or convince them to look for jobs.

My boss is female. Our CEO is an immigrant who is decidedly not white. But we end up with a bunch of white guys applying for positions. That's just the nature of it and Apple, being ONLY 55% white and 60% male has done something remarkable with their diversity... In my experience, that level of diversity is unheard of...

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".

Re:That can't be right!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're absolutely right.

You may be stupid.

Remediating American's Victimization of Indians

[Baldrson]

Its good to see Apple recognizes America's history of victimizing Indians requires remediation by affirmative action favoring the hiring of Indians.

It's easy to fix

[msobkow]

Just break down all the employees into the smallest groups possible. Instead of "White" or "African", break it down to German, Swiss, Dutch, South African, Tanzanian, and so on. With everything down to a few dozen members per group, you'll have a nice flat diversity line. :P

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...)

Re:Next, Samsung

[93 Escort Wagon]

we demand that Samsung engineering department show us their diversity porfolio!

Samsung is proud to report their diversity numbers:

45% Kim
38% Lee
7% Park
6% Choi
4% Other

Samsung strongly believes in promoting a diverse workforce. We currently have a company-wide mandate to raise our Park percentage to 11% by 2018.

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: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: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.