Apple’s Impact Accelerator program, part of its Racial Equity and Justice Initiative has become a tradition. This year marks the third cohort that will have the opportunity to go through the free 12-week program for Black-, Hispanic/Latinx-, and Indigenous-owned businesses that are focused on clean energy and green tech.
Expand Expanding Close
Next Thursday, March 8th, communities across the world will celebrate International Women’s Day 2018. The annual day of recognition draws attention to the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. This year, Apple will again join in the festivities with special events of their own at select retail stores.
Apple has released its annual diversity report which is the first since former HR head Denise Young Smith moved to her newly created role as VP of Inclusion and Diversity. Apple highlights key data points and comparisons in the latest report compared to the last three years in an update to its Diversity microsite.
Apple has twice defeated a shareholder proposal which would tie CEO Tim Cook’s compensation deal to diversity among its senior executives. This year it wants to go one step further and prevent the proposal getting as far as a vote …
Apple’s iTunes Store is celebrating International Women’s Day 2017 by dedicating the entire Movies and TV Shows pages to titles and collections featuring actresses, directors, producers, TV series, films, and documentaries. IWD’s official theme this year is ‘#BeBoldForChange’ and focuses on the goal of a gender inclusive world.
Tim Cook and company lead Apple’s annual shareholders meeting of 2016 this morning, and as usual there were some interesting questions and answers between those in attendance. Like last year, Apple’s rumored electric vehicle project came up, only the Apple CEO didn’t automatically defer to CarPlay this go around. Diversity and Apple’s ongoing battle with the FBI over encryption were also topics of discussion at the Cupertino meeting at Apple HQ.
Over the weekend, Apple posted its latest EEO-1 statement: the Equal Employment Opportunity form follows government regulations to note diversity of Apple’s employee base (via AppleInsider). The newly-released 2015 statement shows that 30 percent of Apple’s employees in the United States are female, a rise of 1% over the numbers posted in the 2014 statement. Black and Hispanic employees make up 8.6 percent and 11.7 percent of the workforce, respectively.
At an executive level, Apple continues to be heavily stacked towards white men. The report says that Apple’s senior officials, executives and managers are 83 percent are male, and 83 percent are white.
That being said, it’s worth noting that Apple refutes the EEO-1 process. It says that the federally-enforced survey is outdated and does not reflect reality. The company’s own numbers paint itself in a much better light, claiming >50% growth in employment of black, Hispanic and female hires.
Update: Apple has decided to include the resolution, but recommends voting against it, arguing that its existing diversity policies cover appointments at all levels within the company.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has said that a resolution submitted by an Apple investor to accelerate diversity on the company’s board and among senior execs should be included in proxy materials sent to shareholders. Bloomberg reports that proposal was prompted by a conversation the shareholder had with his teenage son.
The proposal for an “accelerated recruitment policy” was submitted in September by Antonio Avian Maldonado II, who owns 645 Apple shares. He said he was spurred to act after looking at photos of the directors with his teenage son, who asked him why nearly everyone was white.
Apple rejected the proposal, stating that it was an attempt to micromanage recruitment. Apple told the SEC that it was actively trying to attract minorities but “has no power to ensure that its recruits will accept offers.” The SEC, however, does not accept Apple’s position …
During his current tour to various locales abroad to accompany the launch of iPad Pro this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook stopped by Università Bocconi in Italy to deliver an inspiring speech to students.
The majority of Cook’s speech focused on his time as a student, but he also took time to talk about the importance of his mission to not just make money at Apple but to “leave the world better than we found it.”
Expand
Expanding
Close
Apple has updated its diversity report with new data about gender, race, and ethnicity hiring at the company. The updated diversity report comes one day after Apple committed to sponsoring a minority-focused technology program and one year after releasing its first report on such data.
While the new data does not show dramatic diversity improvements compared with last year’s report, Apple does highlight some key changes in hiring over the last 12 months. The company is still mostly male with men accounting for 69% of Apple around the world, but that’s moved slightly from 70% a year ago.
The same is true for race, as whites make up 54% of the overall company in the United States, but the new report shows an increase in Asian (18% from 15%) and black (8% from 7%) employees from the previous year.
Apple’s report also breaks out gender, race and ethnicity of new hires over the last year, with 35% of new employees around the world being woman.and in the United States, 19% of US hires being Asian, 13% Hispanic, and 11% black. Apple’s diversity website further breaks out each group by sector, including tech and non-tech jobs, leadership, retail, and retail leadership.
Denise Young Smith, Apple’s VP of Worldwide Human Resources, sent the following memo to employees regarding the latest diversity report:
Expand
Expanding
Close
Apple this year will be platinum sponsor of Code2040’s fellowship program geared toward increasing diversity in the tech industry, the company shared with Buzzfeed. Through its sponsorship, Apple will hire 10 of the fellowship program’s 80 students as paid interns working at the company’s Cupertino headquarters.
Denise Young Smith, Apple’s VP of Worldwide Human Resources, said the partnership with Code2040 will offer new opportunities to young Latino/as and African-Americans:
Expand
Expanding
Close
Congressional Black Caucus member and California Congresswoman Barbara Lee has called on Apple to release federal data on the diversity of its workforce, following a meeting with Tim Cook to discuss the issue, reports USA Today.
Apple is one of a number of tech companies that issues its own reports on employee diversity, but refuses to release data from its federally-mandated filing. Companies are required by law to file the information, but are not obligated to make it public …
Expand
Expanding
Close
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhamo3pNlqY]
Apple executives don’t often make appearances at tech industry events, but the company’s Global Human Resources Chief Denise Young Smith this week sat down for a discussion at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference.
During the interview, Smith talked mostly about diversity at Apple and noted the company would release its second report disclosing data on the subject later this year. Smith’s role expanded to head of human resources for the whole company back in February last year after previously leading HR for Apple’s retail operations, and since has been the face of many of Apple’s diversity related initiatives and announcements. Last August, Apple for the first time released diversity data while stepping up initiatives to include employee events celebrating and promoting diversity. It also announced $10K Inclusion and Diversity scholarships last year for minorities in tech.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Mashable has conducted an interesting interview with Tim Cook on the eve of WWDC, one of Apple’s largest events of the year. Although WWDC is known for its product announcements, Apple will announce the next versions of iOS and OS X as well as a streaming music service, the interview revolved around Apple’s efforts on company employee diversity.
Asked about the lack of women at keynotes, Cook says “you’ll see a change tomorrow”. This suggests that women will indeed feature more prominently at Apple’s presentation. In the last ten years, the number of women at Apple’s events comes in at the low single digits, most recently Christy Turlington Burns. Apple’s developer sessions have better gender diversity in their speakers but these are viewable only by registered developers, not the general public.
Apple has told Re/code that it is increasing the number of scholarship places offered at this year’s WWDC from 200 to 350 as part of its work to create greater diversity amongst developers. Those selected get a free ticket to the developer’s conference.
The Cupertino technology giant said it will extend […] scholarships to students age 13 and older and members of organizations working to promote science, technology, engineering and math education for young women, blacks and Latinos. The National Society of Black Engineers, App Camp for Girls and La TechLa are among 20 organizations whose members would be eligible for a scholarship.
The company last year published its first ever diversity report, showing that the company is fairly typical of tech companies today: 70% male, 55% white. CEO Tim Cook said then that he was not satisfied with the numbers, and was doing “meaningful and inspiring” work with women’s and minority groups to bring about change.
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
Cook said during last month’s shareholder meeting that he would work on equality “until my toes point up.”
Apple has, however, refused to make its full federal workforce diversity data public, believed to be on the basis that the job classifications are a poor match for actual roles in the tech sector. Microsoft, Twitter and Amazon also refused.
Tim Cook has written an op-ed in the Washington Post describing legislation permitting businesses to bypass anti-discrimination laws on religious grounds as “very dangerous,” and in fundamental opposition to the founding principles of the United States. In it, he referenced the ugly days of racial segregation, which finally ended only in the 1960s.
Men and women have fought and died fighting to protect our country’s founding principles of freedom and equality. We owe it to them, to each other and to our future to continue to fight with our words and our actions to make sure we protect those ideals. The days of segregation and discrimination marked by “Whites Only” signs on shop doors, water fountains and restrooms must remain deep in our past. We must never return to any semblance of that time. America must be a land of opportunity for everyone.
Apple has previously spoken out against religious discrimination in Arizona, and Cook tweeted on Friday to express Apple’s “deep disappointment” at a new law in Indiana …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Apple has quietly given the front end of its jobs site a facelift adding new employee testimonials and updated product shots. The refreshed layout matches the style of other new pages throughout Apple’s site with the landing page carrying this message: “Do your life’s best work here. With the whole world watching.” Notably, the updated jobs site now includes product shots of the upcoming Apple Watch, specifically an aluminum sport model with a green band and the sensors showing, as well as student in class wearing now Apple-owned Beats by Dr Dre headphones…
A day after announcing the Apple Watch pricing and availability as well as an all-new 12-inch MacBook, Apple has revealed in an interview with Fortune that it will partner with a number of non-profit organizations and donate more than $50 million toward the effort of recruiting women, minorities, and veterans to Apple.
In an exclusive interview with Fortune, Apple’s human resources chief Denise Young Smith said the company is partnering with several non-profit organizations on a multi-year, multi-million-dollar effort to increase the pipeline of women, minorities, and veterans in the technology industry—and, of course, at Apple.
The new effort follows the company’s diversity data report released last August. At the time, Tim Cook sharply expressed that he was “not satisfied with the numbers.”
Expand
Expanding
Close
While the highlight of the OS X 10.10.3 pre-release seed yesterday was the iPhoto replacement app simply called Photos, the beta version of the OS X software update also contains changes to how and which Emoji characters are presented.
First, the new Emoji picker found in the OS X 10.10.3 beta has been redesigned with a new window that allows you to scroll through each category of Emoji characters. The new design is similar to some third-party Emoji keyboards for iOS 8 including Emoji++ as sections no longer require choosing between various pages of characters.
Next, it appears Apple is preparing to include more diverse Emoji characters in the next OS X release as various place holders have been spotted on the beta’s current character picker.
Expand
Expanding
Close
From Apple’s diversity microsite
Although Apple published its own employee diversity report back in August, USA Today reports that the company has refused to make public the full data from its federal diversity filing. While companies are required to file this information annually in a form known as EEO-1, they are not legally obliged to make the data public.
Facebook, eBay, Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn are among the technology companies that have made public their EEO-1s […]
Chief among the companies that decided not to disclose their EEO-1s were Microsoft, Twitter, Apple and Amazon.
When USA Today pressed the matter, Twitter released its filing and Microsoft agreed to do so by the end of the month, but Apple and Amazon did not respond …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Apple CEO Tim Cook today announced via his Twitter account that Apple has received a 100% score on HRC’s Corporate Equality Index for the 13th year in a row. Apple once again makes the list put together by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which rates U.S. workplaces based on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality:
Expand
Expanding
Close
Following a promise by Apple way back in March to introduce more racial diversity to the icons used in Emoji characters, Google and Apple contributors have now posted a proposal of how to make it a reality. The draft standard will extend the current icon set to include five color variants for Emojis including people and faces. The variants are distinguished by Fitzpatrick skin categories, although exact colors are up to the platform vendor (Apple, Google, etc) to interpret.
The White House shared earlier this year that Apple is a participant in President Obama’s ConnectED education program focused on bringing Internet access and technology to schools in need, and today Apple has provided a micro site profiling its effort in the program.
While it was already known that Apple has pledged $100 million to provide iPads, MacBooks, and other products toward the program for schools across the United States, Apple has shared that Apple ConnectED grants are being received by a total of 114 different schools across the country with these schools spread out across 29 states. Apple added that “92% of students from our partner schools are of Hispanic, Black, Native American, Alaskan Native, or Asian heritage.”
Expand
Expanding
Close
NBC is reporting that Apple will offer female employees up to $20,000 to cover the costs of freezing their eggs if they want to defer having children until later in their career, following the example of Facebook which recently introduced the same employee benefit.
Fertility specialists advise that women who want to freeze eggs in order to have children later in life should freeze at least 20 eggs, which will typically take two rounds of treatment at a cost of $10,000 each. The $20k fertility benefit offered by both Apple and Facebook should cover this – though there can be storage costs on top amounting to several hundred dollars per month.
The move is likely to be a controversial one, seen by some as a means of supporting women who want to advance their career to a senior level before taking time off for children, and making a tech career more appealing to women, while others see it as a message that women are expected to put their career first and family life second.
Apple recently announced a range of improvements to its employee benefits program, including increased time off for parental leave, reimbursements for educational classes, a Student Loan Refinancing Program for U.S. employees and a matching program for charitable donations by employees.
Photo credit: Lex Van Lieshout/AFP/Getty Images
