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:
For the past year, we’ve deepened our companywide conversation about inclusion and diversity at Apple. And as you all have seen, we just released demographic data about our employees showing that we’re making some progress in this area. I encourage you to visit our new Inclusion and Diversity page to read Tim’s message, view our workforce demographics update, and learn more about how we’re making impact with some of our biggest initiatives and partners.
In addition, many of you have talked to me personally about diversity, and hundreds of you contributed ideas and asked questions through In Your Voice, our employee feedback program. Today, I want to share some of the compelling stories we received, address your most common questions, and provide an update on highlights of the work we’ve been doing internally and externally to promote inclusion and diversity.
I want to encourage all of you to consider the ways you can make differences matter in your work day to day. And I want to invite you to keep the conversation going, both in personal discussions and through In Your Voice. If you have a concern to raise, an idea to contribute, or a story to tell, please let us know.
Thank you for your time, your thoughtfulness, and your commitment to making Apple better.
Denise
Young Smith provided even more data in an interview with Fortune, adding that 11,000 women were hired globally over the last year. That number is up 65% from the previous year.
And on apple.com/diversity, Tim Cook has published a message on diversity at the company:
A message from Tim Cook.
Apple has always been different. A different kind of company with a different view of the world. It’s a special place where we have the opportunity to create the best products on earth — products that change lives and help shape the future. It’s a privilege we hold dear.
Diversity is critical to innovation and it is essential to Apple’s future. We aspire to do more than just make our company as diverse as the talent available to hire. We must address the broad underlying challenges, offer new opportunities, and create a future generation of employees as diverse as the world around us. We also aspire to make a difference beyond Apple.
This means fostering diversity not just at Apple but throughout our entire ecosystem, from the customers we welcome in our stores to the suppliers and developers we work with. We are committed to fostering and advancing inclusion and diversity across Apple and all the communities we’re a part of. As one example, we’re proud that our spending on women- and minority-owned businesses exceeded $650 million last year.
We want every person who joins our team, every customer visiting our stores or calling for support to feel welcome. We believe in equality for everyone, regardless of race, age, gender, gender identity, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. That applies throughout our company, around the world with no exceptions.
Last year we reported the demographics of our employees for the first time externally, although we have long prioritized diversity. We promised to improve those numbers and we’re happy to report that we have made progress. In the past year we hired over 11,000 women globally, which is 65 percent more than in the previous year. In the United States, we hired more than 2,200 Black employees — a 50 percent increase over last year — and 2,700 Hispanic employees, a 66 percent increase. In total, this represents the largest group of employees we’ve ever hired from underrepresented groups in a single year. Additionally, in the first 6 months of this year, nearly 50 percent of the people we’ve hired in the United States are women, Black, Hispanic, or Native American.
As you can see, we’re working hard to expand our recruiting efforts so we continue hiring talented people from groups that are currently underrepresented in our industry. We’re supporting education with programs like the Thurgood Marshall College Fund to help students at historically black colleges and universities find opportunities in technology. ConnectED is bringing our technology to some of the most economically disadvantaged schools and communities in the United States, so more people have the opportunity to pursue their dreams. We’re also hosting hundreds of students at our annual developer conference, and we’re setting up new programs to help students learn to code.
We are proud of the progress we’ve made, and our commitment to diversity is unwavering. But we know there is a lot more work to be done.
Some people will read this page and see our progress. Others will recognize how much farther we have to go. We see both. And more important than these statistics, we see tens of thousands of Apple employees all over the world, speaking dozens of languages, working together. We celebrate their differences and the many benefits we and our customers enjoy as a result.
In a first, Apple also published its most recently filed Federal Employer Information Report EEO-1 online, which includes data from July 2014, but adds that it will share its 2015 form once it’s filed with the federal government. The move comes after Young Smith recently promised greater transparency in its diversity reporting and others pressured Apple to release its federal hiring diversity data.
Apple notes that it believes its data from Apple Human Resources is more reflective of its efforts, however, declaring that the EEO-1 form “has not kept pace with changes in industry or the American workforce over the past half century.”