Apple’s mid-year diversity report meets with criticism

Apple’s 19 per cent black/Hispanic workforce is still well under the 26 per cent national tally across all industries, but minority rights advocates are mostly concerned with the lack of success that these groups are having in Apple’s technical teams.

The company released its diversity report Thursday, amid growing pressure on Apple and other technology companies to be more inclusive in their hiring practices.

The chip designer company isn’t be on the way to success very soon, as it is still far away from its goal of truly proportionate the US representation by 2020. Although most of the companies only started disclosing their reports at the urging of others, Intel has been releasing these reports for roughly 10 years. Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged in the report that “diversity is critical to innovation and it is essential to Apple’s future”, noting the need to have women and minorities designing products that would appeal to an increasingly diverse audience.

“Having diverse leaders at the top is incredibly important as it shows companies culture and inclusiveness”, Kapin says. Tech professionals in the U.S. are 53 percent white and 25 percent Asian.

Google led the way in May, releasing figures that showed its workforce is 70% male and 61% white. The numbers dive sharply for employees in leadership roles, where only 17% of people are women and 6% are minorities.

Cook admitted that there was “a lot” more work to be done, but that was the full extent of Reuter’s comment.

Though these shifts aren’t huge in percentage terms, they are notable for a company with tens of thousands of employees. Globally, the company hired 65% more women employees than in 2014, taking the total percentage of women to 31%, up 1% from 2014. “We see both”, Cook said.

According to an Equal Opportunity Employment (EEO-1) report filed for 2014 sixty of the eighty-three people on Apple’s leadership team were white men. “We aspire to do extra than simply make our firm as numerous because the expertise obtainable to rent”. (See the latest diversity reports from 11 tech companies here.).

That is a common complaint from tech companies, but until the high-tech industry develops better standards to measure diversity, the EEO-1 is the best way to judge what kind of progress companies – and the industry – are making, Rosalind Hudnell, Intel’s chief diversity officer, told USA TODAY previous year.

Intel said it is aiming to reflect the diversity of the available workforce. In May, for instance, Google unveiled a $150 million plan that increased funding for its diversity programs by more than 30 percent.

“We are proud of the progress we’ve made, and our commitment to diversity is unwavering”.