Apple Makes Slight Progress On Diversity While Its Rivals Are Making Practically None (macrumors.com)

The workforce at Apple is still predominately white and male, reveals the diversity report the company released Wednesday. But that doesn't mean that its efforts to improve diversity haven't yielded improvements. This is the third year that the Cupertino giant has released its diversity numbers and the balance is improving, although a bit slowly. From a MacRumors report: Its overall workforce, including tech, non-tech, and retail jobs, is 68% male and 32% female as of June 2016, a slight change from a 69%-31% split in 2015. Apple's race and ethnicity breakdown among U.S. employees is 19% Asian, 9% Black, 12% Hispanic, 2% Multiracial, 1% Other, and 56% White, representing a 2 percent increase in White employees and a 1 percent increase in both Asian and Hispanic employees compared to last year's data. Females represent 37% of Apple's global new hires, while U.S. underrepresented minorities represent 27% of global new hires. Apple defines underrepresented minorities as "groups whose representation in tech has been historically low -- Black, Hispanic, Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Other Pacific Islander."Washington Post compares Apple's progress to other Silicon Valley giants, claiming that rest of the industry is mostly sitting idle. (Alternate source: Reuters) From the report: At Facebook, black and Hispanic employees make up 2 and 4 percent of the employee base. Despite commitments to diversity, neither Google nor Facebook have made a dent in those numbers since they first announced them in 2014.

Comments

Re:What would be considered diverse

[HBI]

Another thing to consider is representation as a percentage of the population where Apple has facilities. For instance, Baltimore has a lot of black people. But Apple, to my knowledge, only has one Apple Store in the metro area. So even if they pack the Towson Apple Store with 90% black people (an over-representation, to be sure), that still doesn't fix their overall numbers, which probably have a lot to do with having facilities in places like Cupertino, which is something like 60% Asian and 29.3% white, with a mere 0.6% black.

I wonder if people are advocating busing in people from remote locations to "fix" the balance?

All in Retail?

[TooManyNames]

Hmm. I wonder what Apple could have that neither Facebook nor Google possess in the US? What might possibly account for the discrepancy between Apple and other big tech companies? Oh yeah, probably the 30,000 retail workers (out of a total of 43,000) in their Apple stores. I wonder what the breakdown would be for the technical jobs that Apple relies upon for the products those retail workers are hawking? I'm guessing that it'd probably be in line with what Facebook and Google are posting.

Good for Apple for being more diverse that Google, I guess, but I'd bet it's a hell of a lot easier to broaden overall diversity when you essentially require a Starbucks level of skill for the majority of your workforce.