Apple's new diversity exec hails from Bank of America
Cynthia Bowman is Apple's latest Vice President of Inclusion and Diversity after a 17-year career at Bank of America.
Apple Park
Apple has seen some changes around how it manages diversity and inclusion in recent years. The top executive job Chief People Officer was introduced in 2023 after splitting the role away from Deirdre O'Brien, who now focuses solely on retail.
The reporting executive to the Chief People Officer is the Vice President of Inclusion and Diversity. According to a report from Bloomberg, Cynthia Bowman has stepped into the role.
"We are excited that Cynthia Bowman will serve as Apple's next Vice President of Inclusion and Diversity," an Apple spokesperson said in a statement. "Cynthia is an accomplished leader in her field and is deeply committed to the work we're doing to advance inclusion and diversity at Apple."
Bowman served as chief diversity, inclusion, and social responsibility officer during her tenure at Bank of America. Her career there spanned 17 years before leaving earlier in 2024.
Apple's push for diversity and inclusion is one of the company's core tenants. It has a dedicated website to showcase the effort, though it hasn't been updated with new data since 2022.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
It's funny when people object to intentional efforts for diversity and inclusion as a pearl-clutching affront to "merit-based" hiring, as if merit based hiring has ever been a thing. When non-male, non-white people are excluded and steered away from a field like coding or engineering at every turn starting with early childhood, the resultant competition among the folks who make it to the point where they can even apply for the job cannot then be called winners in a merit-based system. If your competition has been repeatedly kneecapped before they ever make it to the starting line, getting to the finish line first does not make you a merit-based winner. If half your competition has never had a chance to get to the race, even as you "win," you should know that you've never actually been tested in a merit-based system.
Thank you.
That's where you've lost the thread. How do you "hire the best out of interested humans" when many are told that they shouldn't be or are not allowed to be interested? Up until laws were passed to force the issue, the overtly preferred skin color was 'white,' and that skin enclosed the person a man. There was no "so be it" attitude if "the more qualified person is not the preferred skin color." If you weren't the preferred skin color, you need not apply. Try watching the movie Hidden Figures. It's all over cable TV these days, so it should be easy to find. It dramatizes, among other things, Katherine Johnson's experience as the actual most-qualified mathematician in a room full of white male engineers in NASA's early days. She was tentatively brought in because, as a clerical "computer" (a human calculator), it was noticed that she was really good at math, and these folks were on a deadline to beat the Russians into space, so they made an exception to the all-white rule.
Once there, Johnson was nearly fired at one point because she "took long breaks," which were necessitated because the "colored" bathrooms were in a different building. You can't take a quick pee break when it takes twenty minutes just to get there and back. The male engineers resented Johnson's mere presence and loathed the idea that a negro woman would check their math.
The fact is that up until that point, none of those men ever had to compete against Katherine Johnson or anyone else who looked like her means that they literally were not employed just based on merit. They were first selected because they were white men, and only then did they compete against each other. Before that moment, they hadn't competed against the meritoriously better mathematician because she hadn't even been allowed in the room.
You'll probably say, "That was sixty years ago. It's different, now."
Is it really? Hint: not so much. Without civil rights laws making it illegal to overtly exclude women and racial minorities, it would be exactly the same now as it was then.
What about with civil rights laws? Look around with your eyes open. That didn't end racism or sexism. Not by a long-shot. Ask any woman or any racial minority who's trying to compete in your "merit-based' world when the last time was that they experienced sexism or racism, and it will be recent. Quite possibly today. It's still true that, before they even get into the building, from early childhood to now, they've experienced large and small indignities, roadblocks and hurdles that you did not face, for no other reason than their gender or ethnicity, just to get into the same room as you.
Now we have civil rights laws that disallow overt exclusion, and we have diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives designed to recognize that the civil rights laws aren't that old, and are not expansive enough to assure that many people still haven't had a much harder time just getting into the room for no reason other than their ethnicity or gender, and what do we get?
Resentment! Ignoring the fact that the previous status quo was never merit-based, the assumption now is that anyone who is not white and male didn't get here on merit, so they are all suspect, and probably don't deserve to be here.
The reality is that until the issue is forced, and forced for long enough that racial and gender diversity starts to feel normal, there can be no straight-up merit based system. You should also read MLK's I Have a Dream speech - all of it. King did help us envision a world where we judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, but he also said that we have to do the hard work first before we get there. You can't have a fair result at the finish line until you've assured there is equality in getting to the starting line.
We *have* equity. A ridiculous amount of it, compared to other parts of our society. While some of that comes from merit, quite a bit comes from a history of truly evil behavior. Now I am not personally responsible for that behavior, and hopefully neither are you. That doesn't mean we don't have some collective responsibility to work on reducing the harms that *still exist today* due to those evils.