Apple diversity report shows little progress

Jessica Guynn | USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple says it's making progress in hiring women and underrepresented minorities, recruiting more diverse candidates in the past 12 months than in any previous year, but overall there was little change.

That's the bottom line from Apple's diversity report released Thursday.

Apple hired 65% more women, 50% more African-Americans and 66% more Latinos last year than it did the previous year, the company says. In the first half of 2015, nearly half of new hires were women, African-Americans, Latinos or Native Americans, according to Apple.

"This represents the largest group of employees we've ever hired from underrepresented groups in a single year" including 11,000 women, Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in a letter that accompanied the report.

But like other major technology companies, Apple is still overwhelmingly male and white. Some 69% of the company is male and 54% is white. Leadership of the company is 72% male and 63% white. Technical employees are 53% white. Those percentages barely budged since last year.

"Some people will read this page and see our progress," Cook said. "Others will recognize how much farther we have to go. We see both."

Apple took a step toward transparency by releasing its federal diversity data for the first time. USA TODAY has repeatedly asked Apple to release the data. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., last week also called on Apple and other technology holdouts to produce the data. She and two other members of the Congressional Black Caucus were on a swing through Silicon Valley, turning up the heat on tech companies to hire more African-Americans. They met with Cook and other Silicon Valley executives.

Lee responded to Apple's latest diversity numbers on Twitter, praising Cook's commitment and calling the hiring of 2,200 African-Americans "progress."

For years, technology companies fought sharing any demographic information about their employees, claiming the information was a trade secret. Only in the past year or so have the industry's top companies opened up about the diversity deficit in their ranks.

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson is urging all companies including high-profile start-ups such as Airbnb and Uber to release the data, too.

American companies collect and report information about their workforces to the federal government each year in a form called the EEO-1. The EEO-1 is a standard form that breaks down race, ethnicity and gender of work forces by job classification.

"Our most recently filed Federal Employer Information Report EEO-1 is available for download below, representing employees as of July 2014," Apple said in its diversity report. "We will make the 2015 EEO-1 available when we file it with the federal government."

The company added that it will begin to make the documents publicly available, but "it’s not how we measure our progress."

"The EEO-1 has not kept pace with changes in industry or the American workforce over the past half century," the company said. "We believe the information we report elsewhere on this site is a far more accurate reflection of our progress toward diversity."

That is a common complaint from tech companies, but until the high-tech industry develops better standards to measure diversity, the EEO-1 is the best way to judge what kind of progress companies — and the industry — are making, Rosalind Hudnell, Intel's chief diversity officer, told USA TODAY last year.

More than 70% — or 60 out of 83 people — of Apple's senior executives are white men, according to the EEO-1 from 2014. Twelve are white women. Of the 83 executives, one was Hispanic, two were African American and eight were Asian.

Much of Apple's diversity in in sales, which includes its retail stores. Nearly half of all of Apple's African American workers and 33% of its female workers are in sales positions, according to the EEO-1.

Jackson called Apple's release of the EEO-1 a "positive step" but reiterated his demand that tech companies be even more transparent as they attempt to bring greater diversity to the industry.

Apple, which for decades prized secrecy, has not gone to the lengths of other tech companies. For example, it is not publicly disclosing hiring goals for women and underrepresented minorities as Intel and Pinterest recently did.

"RainbowPUSH has asked companies to go beyond the EEO-1 report and provide additional, comprehensive, transparent data points, showing year over year numbers and percentages relating to hiring of women and people of color in the tech and non tech sectors; in leadership positions; retail; and their supplier diversity spend," Jackson said in an emailed statement. "This data provides a much clearer picture of what companies are actually doing."

Follow USA TODAY senior technology writer Jessica Guynn@jguynn