Apple's 2015 EEO-1 report shows slow progress toward workplace diversity
Over the weekend, Apple quietly released its latest EEO-1 Federal Employer Information Report tallying employment diversity information through Aug. 1, 2015, revealing raw numbers that, while a slight improvement year over year, are incongruent with statements the company made last year.
While the data (PDF link) points to progress in Apple's hiring practices, year-over-year change in ethnicity, gender and race distribution paints a different picture than the rosy landscape outlined by CEO Tim Cook last year.
In a statement posted to the company's diversity webpage last August, Cook said Apple hired more than 11,000 women globally between 2014 and 2015, a 65 percent increase. In the US, black hires grew 2,200, or 50 percent, while Hispanic hires were up 66 percent to 2,700.
Apple's 2015 EEO-1, however, shows a net increase of only 1,475 black employees and 1,633 Hispanics from the previous year. The disparity between Apple's results and those posted in this year's EEO-1 have not been explained, though Apple could be including backfill replacements or other metrics not taken into account by federal guidelines.
On that point, Apple says it does not use EEO-1 numbers to define progress, claiming the federal survey has "not kept pace with changes in industry or the American workforce over the past half century." A "more accurate reflection" of Apple's progress is represented by curated data points offered through its website, the company says, though the page in question was last updated in August and does not yet contain information from the 2015 EEO-1 report.
On a year-over-year basis, Apple hired 6,378 white employees for the period ending in August, accounting for 59 percent of the company's entire US workforce, the EEO-1 data says. Net Asian hires came out to 2,824, adding to a total of 12,583 people, or 17 percent of US operations.
Changes in executive and upper level management tiers were less dramatic, with Hispanic employees accounting for 7 percent of the total, up 1 percent from 2014. Apple hired more black, Asian and multiracial workers to fill leadership roles, but the overall breakdown went unchanged due to similar growth in white hires.
Like many tech companies, Apple is being pushed to create a more racially diverse workplace. For example, a proposal submitted for vote at Apple's upcoming shareholders meeting seeks to add "people of color" to upper management positions. Apple chose to include the proposal in its proxy statement, but advised a vote against, saying such regulation is burdensome and unnecessary given its current hiring initiatives.
While the data (PDF link) points to progress in Apple's hiring practices, year-over-year change in ethnicity, gender and race distribution paints a different picture than the rosy landscape outlined by CEO Tim Cook last year.
In a statement posted to the company's diversity webpage last August, Cook said Apple hired more than 11,000 women globally between 2014 and 2015, a 65 percent increase. In the US, black hires grew 2,200, or 50 percent, while Hispanic hires were up 66 percent to 2,700.
Apple's 2015 EEO-1, however, shows a net increase of only 1,475 black employees and 1,633 Hispanics from the previous year. The disparity between Apple's results and those posted in this year's EEO-1 have not been explained, though Apple could be including backfill replacements or other metrics not taken into account by federal guidelines.
On that point, Apple says it does not use EEO-1 numbers to define progress, claiming the federal survey has "not kept pace with changes in industry or the American workforce over the past half century." A "more accurate reflection" of Apple's progress is represented by curated data points offered through its website, the company says, though the page in question was last updated in August and does not yet contain information from the 2015 EEO-1 report.
On a year-over-year basis, Apple hired 6,378 white employees for the period ending in August, accounting for 59 percent of the company's entire US workforce, the EEO-1 data says. Net Asian hires came out to 2,824, adding to a total of 12,583 people, or 17 percent of US operations.
Changes in executive and upper level management tiers were less dramatic, with Hispanic employees accounting for 7 percent of the total, up 1 percent from 2014. Apple hired more black, Asian and multiracial workers to fill leadership roles, but the overall breakdown went unchanged due to similar growth in white hires.
Like many tech companies, Apple is being pushed to create a more racially diverse workplace. For example, a proposal submitted for vote at Apple's upcoming shareholders meeting seeks to add "people of color" to upper management positions. Apple chose to include the proposal in its proxy statement, but advised a vote against, saying such regulation is burdensome and unnecessary given its current hiring initiatives.
Comments
I think the disparity in the figures could be partially explained by the number of people that Apple hires for the retail arm of the business. Retail staff tend to come and go quite regularly, especially over Christmas and the school holiday periods. It looks to me as if Apple bases its PR statement on the number of people it hires, without taking into account the number people who leave.
I have to admit that as I am not a US citizen, I don't know very much about the EEO-1 reporting rules. I tried to read up on it, and I found this on the advisory.
So does the filing require that you fill in figures for your world-wide operations, or just for the United States? If it is the latter then that could also explain part of the discrepancy.
The intent of diversity programs should be to stamp out racism and ensure that no applicant is given an advantage over any other applicant because of their reparative skin colors. If the most qualified candidate is always given the job - but the targets are not being met - the targets are wrong! The targets should be revised to reflect the realities of the potential pool of qualified applicants - or ignored completely when there is proof that hiring and promotions are based solely on merit.
People compare diversity targets to workforce composition of a company and when the numbers don't match - they complain that a company is "not doing enough" to meet the targets. I would love to see Tim Cook stand up and say to these people "It's because we don't care about the targets or frankly even look at them! We maintain a diverse workplace and we hire the most qualified candidate for every single job opening that we fill. We're happy to see that our hiring policies have resulted in a workforce composition that is close to your 'targets', but your targets seem to be inaccurate based on our extensive experience evaluating qualified applicants for our industry. If there are enough qualified applicants within your demographics to fill the percentages of positions that you call targets - it appears that they don't want to work for Apple because we haven't come across them during our recruitment activities. Perhaps you could use our data to update your targets to a percentage that is accurate, reasonable and most importantly achievable without giving preferential treatment to a less qualified applicant because of their skin color."
Creating an inclusive working environment is not pandering to special interests.
If the government and companies really wanted to change things they would do blind interviews and the resume can only have relevant information, no information which indicates your race or such, and name should be removed as well. I bet you would begin to seeing the best hired and those who are not the best can not say it was because of their background.
As I said before, where are all these minority tech people that Apple is discriminating against. I worked in the Tech Field for a long time I have not seen many minority tech people and I travel all over. In order to hire them they first have to exist and be interested and capable of doing the job. My experience has been most non-white males are not interesting is being geeky tech people, they actually have a personality and want to have fun verse being stuck behind a computer all day. So they going to force a bunch of non-geeks to work with geeks lets see how well that works.
It's so disheartening to then see articles like this where "progress" is measured by reducing the number of people with my skin color and gender. It's like wtf??
I'm not saying that a lack of diversity isn't an issue, but perhaps it should be solved by society rather than private corporations. I really wouldn't mind if the industry became as black as basketball if the reason was the talent.
I'm too old, white, non-nose/face piercing, and non-tattooed for Apple to hire me I guess.
Anyhow, conceptually, I agree with everything you've said - however, in reality, it's hard to keep any indication as to race off of a resume. Things such as the places you've lived, the places you've worked and the places you've been educated can contain clues as to a persons ethnicity - especially when some of those places are known to be primarily populated predominantly with one particular ethnicity. There's also a need, in customer facing positions, that the applicants maintain themselves in a presentable manner - ie: clean, neat and no visible devil worship tattoos - so a face to face interview becomes somewhat mandatory for customer facing positions - although I suppose it could be relegated to one of the last steps in the hiring process after the pool of applicants has been narrowed down to the top 3 or 4 people. The other big issue that makes anonymous applications/interviews unfeasible in the real world is the rampant practice of lying on your resume. Personally, I've never lied on a resume, but apparently the practice is so common that I've been told during more than 1 interview that the interviewer "was assuming" that my interview had been exaggerated because "everybody does it". So I was actually penalized for honesty.
I wish it were possible to do as you suggest and have interviews which hid all non-work related aspects of the candidates. Perhaps it would be possible if the interviews were done by proxy. A "man in the middle" would relay the questions and answers between an interviewer and applicant. He could certify the persons appearance was acceptable - but ensure that everything that passed back and forth was sanitized. For example, being educated at either Cornell University or University of New Delhi would be translated to "educated at a respected, accredited University".
Of course this is all theoretical. None of this will ever happen and it's sad that we live in a society where something like this might be necessary to ensure fairness in the hiring process. So - I'm not really suggesting companies interview by proxy - I'm simply thinking out loud about possible ways for companies to prove that ethnicity is not a factor in their hiring decisions. I don't think the above is a good idea - however it is one way that could take race completely out of the equation.
As much as I believe that Diversity is not a problem at Apple, I also acknowledge that there are many companies where racism is rampant and it definitely is a problem. It's a shame that the special interest groups single out Apple in their press releases. They do it because they know that they'll get more publicity for their cause by mentioning Apple in the headline. They wouldn't get nearly the same amount of media coverage if they were calling out "XYZ Grommets International" for not meeting diversity targets! Sadly, many people don't realize this and really do believe that there is a problem at Apple.
Your correct there are jobs which appearances matters, and people do lie on what the can do. There is a group in this world who does not think nothing of spending a night with a friend being tutored on a subject then show up to an interview the next day and claim to be a expert on the subject because someone told them about it. They do not think they are lying either, they see it as they know the subject and can learn on the job. Yeah this same group is know for the man in the middle, they would even have people take online tests for them or provide the answer to question as the do Skype interviews. It has gotten so bad that even Google will set up a online Skype interview with someone and ask them to write code in an online program as they watch the person type.
I can not say how bad racism is today in most companies, My personally experience has been that people hire people like themselves as I pointed out. The problem is most people today call this racism, you are seen a bad person for hiring someone who maybe like yourself verse hiring someone who is completely different. This is why we have the HR police running around making sure managers are hiring people different than them. I have hires a lot of different people mostly tech people and because many years ago someone pointed out to me we tend to want work with people like ourselves, we could over looks a good person for the job and go for what we know. Well i did hire different people with different background and had mix results, some good and some bad. Most of the bad one was because someone was looking over my shoulder.
Keep in mind People lived in groups like themselves for 1000's of years and today we telling everyone they need to turn off evolutionary thinking and do something completely different over night. I believe all the PC crap and the incentives they put in place to be PC made the entire situation worse. Today because of those bad hiring experience I am always second guessing my decision on whether someone is the right person of we doing it because someone is saying it is the right thing.