Main image of article Apple's Diversity Progress Slow: Report
Apple’s latest diversity figures (PDF) show slight progress toward the company’s goals of integrating more women and minorities into its workforce. According to Business Insider, which crunched the gross numbers from that report into percentages, the percentage of women at Apple currently stands at 30 percent, up from 29 percent in 2014. The number of black employees ticked upward slightly, from 8 percent to 8.6 percent, while Latino employees advanced from 11.5 percent to 11.7 percent. The executive team remains 83 percent white and male. In a note on its Diversity webpage, Apple claimed this latest filing, known as the Federal Employer Information Report EEO-1, is “not how we measure our progress.” The EEO-1, it added, “has not kept pace with changes in industry or the American workforce over the past half century.” It remains to be seen whether Apple will release other data that paints a rosier picture of its employee makeup. Like many tech companies in Silicon Valley and beyond, Apple has made a very public pledge to make its workforce more diverse. “Diversity is critical to innovation and it is essential to Apple’s future,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in a public letter last year. “We must address the broad underlying challenges, offer new opportunities, and create a future generation of employees as diverse as the world around us.” Despite those pledges of progress, however, most tech companies have been slow to diversify their respective workforces. For example, Microsoft saw its percentage of women decline from 29 percent to 26.8 percent in the twelve months leading up to September 2015. And a recent study by the University of California, Davis, noted that women directors constituted only 15.5 percent of corporate boardrooms at tech firms.