Informal Apple survey shows 6% wage gap between men, women

AppleInsider

An informal Apple pay equity survey organized by one of the company's software engineers shows a 6% wage gap between the salaries of men and women.

Credit: Apple

The survey was started by Cher Scarlett, who created it outside of Apple's purview after the company squashed a series of other pay equity surveys. At the time, Apple said the surveys weren't allowed because they collect sensitive information.

Early results for Scarlett's survey analyzed by The Verge suggest that the wage gap between men and women at Apple remains around 6%. That's about the same as the average in the San Francisco Bay Area, which hovers around 5%.

The results of the survey shouldn't be considered scientific -- only about 2,000 people responded to it on an opt-in basis. However, Apple has claimed that it is working toward achieving pay equity within its ranks. Back in 2016, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that women at Apple made 99.6 cents on the dollar, and underrepresented groups made 99.7 cents on the dollar.

"We know pay equity was a problem in the past and Apple did something to fix it, but we're having this conversation again because we're seeing gaps in certain areas of the company and we want to know what Apple will do to prevent it from happening year-over-year," Scarlett told The Verge.

Some of the other findings included the fact that there were fewer women, non-binary employees, and non-white people in technical roles or senior positions at the company -- two places that often see higher salaries.

The Apple software engineer and a small team of the company's data analysis group will soon present the findings to Apple. Earlier in August, a source within Apple told The Verge that ad director at the company discouraged staffers from taking the survey.

The Verge, which was granted access to the survey data, came up with the findings by isolating the 1,400 technical roles and grouping them by job level, gender, and race. It then found the median salaries for the job level and parsed the data from there.

In a request for comment, an Apple spokesperson sent The Verge the company's boilerplate public statement on pay equity.

"Apple has a firm and longstanding commitment to pay equity. Globally, employees of all genders earn the same when engaging in similar work with comparable experience and performance," the statement reads. "In the United States, the same is true for employees of all races and ethnicities. We don't ask for salary history during the recruiting process. Our recruiters base offers on Apple employees in similar roles. And every year, we examine the compensation employees receive and ensure that we maintain pay equity."

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jumpingcoco

I think the wage gap is more related to job type, which certain groups of people tend to like that job type more than others, than gender, people always trying to make an eye-catching title

lkrupp

Same pay for lesser performance? More pay for above average performance, male or female? Or equal pay regardless of performance, male or female?

edited August 2021

beats

ABSOLUTELY PATHETIC.

This “wage gap” myth just won’t die!! It’s been debunked since the 1970s.

Google did an audit because of stupid feminists claiming females get paid less because they have a vagina. We’ll surprise! They found women were getting paid MORE and adjusted the pay with bonuses for the men who were paid less for the same work!! 😆

The minimum wage is the same whether you’re female or male. If females got paid less by default, males would be out of work!!

lkrupp said:

Same pay for lesser performance? More pay for above average performance, male or female? Or equal pay regardless of performance, male or female?

The pay gap has been debunked since the 1970s. Because of this, now the narrative of feminists is demanding MORE pay for THE SAME work or less for females. It’s a never-ending ladder of entitlement.

For example, they compare the pay of male CEOs to a bottom position of a female out of college.

mike1

So many variables that I am sure the employee couldn't gather information about.

How did they factor in experience levels? Longevity with the company? Roles in the company? Truthfulness of the salaries provided by the 2000.

Exactly how many non-binary employees do you expect to find in a group of 2,000 people?

I know most of these issues are contrived by a vocal minority, but it's amazing how many malcontents there seem to be.

octomonkey

The entire concept of "pay equity" is worrisome to me.  In my 40 odd years of working in a variety of jobs at a variety of organizations I cannot recall a single instance of two people doing the same (level of) work.

When working assembly, some people worked faster and some performed their work more accurately - although the argument could be made they were performing the "same job".  When doing design work it was the same affair with some people clearly outperforming their peers either in quantity or quality of work (and sometimes both).  During my time in the military it was, again, the same although the gap between performance was even greater with some higher paid personnel doing less or inferior work than that of their lower paid counterpart.

All that said, I have yet to meet a single employee who felt they were overpaid or even paid enough.  In my experience employees invariably overrate their work and contributions while griping about their pay.  With the exception of the military the salaries of my contemporaries were not known to me, nor should they have been.  With the exception of my time in the military, when I felt my compensation was insufficient, I went to the boss and told him so...  as everybody has the right to do.  If you do not receive the response you desire, you always have the option of finding another job.

maestro64

Any one who works at any larger company with diverse work force will tell you it's not unusual to see a spread of 5% to 10% in wages between people doing similar work. Not all people start at the same time and everyone does not get the same raises. And list goes on. I ran a departments of 15 engineers and tech personell with experience ranging from just out of colleges to 20 yrs of experience and the wage difference was 20% to 30% many of there people did about the same work but they definitely did not deserve the same pay. In all the years managing professionals only once did have to deal with someone who was under paid. This person was hired by someone else at the company and when they came to my department I saw they were almost 1/2 of where they should have been, but is was not the companies fault, it was what the person asked for to leave their current job to come to company. They did not negotiate their pay.

All these people who think everyone should be paid the same are the same people who want to give  everyone a participation awards at kids sports. 

My kids played lots of sports and got their fair share of those trophies, eventually they figured out none of this meant anything except the ones they felt they actual earned. They through away all those participations awards  and kept the ones they actual got for winning and they contributed to the win.

sbdude

I’m so glad this informal, non-scientific, and non-representative survey warranted publishing in the first. Any scientific survey that returned a wage gap of 6% could be accounted for in the margin of error. What a joke.

zoetmb

You can’t take a large group of men and women and compare their average salaries and make any conclusions from that.  You have to compare people in equivalent jobs.  Even in that case, you have to analyze whether the difference between the salaries of men and women is more than the variance between just men and just women in similar positions. 

If a gap is found when non-equivalent positions are compared, it STILL doesn’t mean that women are underpaid.  It just means that there aren’t enough women in positions that happen to pay more.  That’s a problem, but a different problem. 

In the companies I worked at, the difference in salaries between Vice-Presidents regardless of gender was huge.  There were VP’s making $100K and VP’s making $250K.  This wasn’t about gender as much as it was about tenure, experience and value to the company.  

I would argue that only a 6% wage difference overall is probably quite remarkably good.  

jungmark

“isolating the 1,400 technical roles and grouping them by job level, gender, and race“

Odd nothing on years experience and education?

genovelle

Or negotiation skills. Some can sell their value far better than others, male or female. 

sdw2001

As others have noted, there are too many variables beyond gender that affect pay.  They include profession choice, choice in how much to work, work quality, etc.  For example, do two law partners  with equal experience and performance ratings make the same?  Not necessarily.  What if one chooses to work 50 hours a week and have a family life, and the other works 90 hours a week?  People make choices about work and life all the time.  It just so happens that a sizable number of women will prioritize family.  There may be other factors as well.  The gender pay gap is widely a myth.  The gap that exists (which from what I understand is close to Apple’s number) is typically explainable by the above factors.  

leavingthebigg

Another negative scenario about Apple reported by The Verge, which was granted access to the data and did the work to categorize the data for the report. Hmmmm….

I suspect The Verge is orchestrating the negativity it is reporting about Apple. 

mikethemartian

So how much of Tim Cook’s pay would they have to cut to bring the averages even?

mikethemartian

mike1 said:

So many variables that I am sure the employee couldn't gather information about.

How did they factor in experience levels? Longevity with the company? Roles in the company? Truthfulness of the salaries provided by the 2000.

Exactly how many non-binary employees do you expect to find in a group of 2,000 people?

I know most of these issues are contrived by a vocal minority, but it's amazing how many malcontents there seem to be.

The proper way would be to do an ANOVA.

maestro64

jungmark said:

“isolating the 1,400 technical roles and grouping them by job level, gender, and race“

Odd nothing on years experience and education?

That's because when you talk to these people who think there is wage gap only consider what the job is they do not care about years of experience or education. As far as they're concern of two people are doing the same work they both should be paid the same. I found that programmers are the ones who believe this the most, they all write code so they all should be paid the same.

octomonkey

maestro64 said:

jungmark said:

“isolating the 1,400 technical roles and grouping them by job level, gender, and race“

Odd nothing on years experience and education?

That's because when you talk to these people who think there is wage gap only consider what the job is they do not care about years of experience or education. As far as they're concern of two people are doing the same work they both should be paid the same. I found that programmers are the ones who believe this the most, they all write code so they all should be paid the same.

When I was programming, I never believed that!  You had people who could program (few and far between), those who thought they could program (and almost could if you squinted and didn't expect too much), and those who were a lost cause and needed everybody else to find the bugs in the spaghetti code they wrote...  you know, the ones who end up leaving to go to AC Delco.  On a side note, don't blame me if you have a problem with your GM car!

maestro64

OctoMonkey said:

maestro64 said:

jungmark said:

“isolating the 1,400 technical roles and grouping them by job level, gender, and race“

Odd nothing on years experience and education?

That's because when you talk to these people who think there is wage gap only consider what the job is they do not care about years of experience or education. As far as they're concern of two people are doing the same work they both should be paid the same. I found that programmers are the ones who believe this the most, they all write code so they all should be paid the same.

When I was programming, I never believed that!  You had people who could program (few and far between), those who thought they could program (and almost could if you squinted and didn't expect too much), and those who were a lost cause and needed everybody else to find the bugs in the spaghetti code they wrote...  you know, the ones who end up leaving to go to AC Delco.  On a side note, don't blame me if you have a problem with your GM car!

Yeah I do not buy GM cars... 

I am not lumping all programming or software people together. The gap in pay discussion started in the non-professional world and slowed creeped it way into the professional world back in the 90's when I first experience the discussion and most ever time it came up it start with in the software development groups. Back then it was a little hard to determine if someone programming skills we better than the next person except for bug counts but they were not tracking it to that level. At the end of the day they all thought they wrote code and they all should be making the same as long as making the same was getting the pay of someone whole had a lot more skills and knowledge and got paid more than anyone else.

rattlhed

You could have one non-binary employee out of 500 "regular people" making $90k a year, while the average of the other 499 make $95k a year (and there are going to be some rock stars in that other 499 that bump up the average) and your survey results will state that the non-binary employee is underpaid.  That's how this shit works and is not representative of how the real works.  Quit your moaning and get back to work.  If you don't like your job, find another company that will pay you what you think you're worth.  That's the advantage of a free market and what makes America so great to live in.  

filemakerfeller

mike1 said:

Exactly how many non-binary employees do you expect to find in a group of 2,000 people? 

More than zero and less than one.

mplsp

Beats said:

ABSOLUTELY PATHETIC.

This “wage gap” myth just won’t die!! It’s been debunked since the 1970s.

Google did an audit because of stupid feminists claiming females get paid less because they have a vagina. We’ll surprise! They found women were getting paid MORE and adjusted the pay with bonuses for the men who were paid less for the same work!! 😆

The minimum wage is the same whether you’re female or male. If females got paid less by default, males would be out of work!!

lkrupp said:

Same pay for lesser performance? More pay for above average performance, male or female? Or equal pay regardless of performance, male or female?

The pay gap has been debunked since the 1970s. Because of this, now the narrative of feminists is demanding MORE pay for THE SAME work or less for females. It’s a never-ending ladder of entitlement.

For example, they compare the pay of male CEOs to a bottom position of a female out of college.

please provide sources for your 'debunking.'