We’re in the second year of America’s big tech companies reporting their staff diversity data—and Apple just raised the ante.
Most companies are just updating what they reported last year, but Apple is providing some new stats. And they’re important. In addition to reporting how many women and underrepresented minorities it has on staff, the company revealed what percentage of new hires they make up.
Encouragingly, the new hire class is substantially more diverse than Apple’s current staff , which would help with the homogeneity problem if it becomes a trend. (Note that all gender data is global, and all race/ethnicity data is US only.)
Last summer, Google publicly reported diversity data for the first time, nudging other tech companies to follow suit. Hopefully Apple’s move will spur companies, including Google, to report these other data points.
Tracking hiring trends will help hold these powerful companies accountable for the big promises they’re making about improving gender and ethnic diversity among their employees. Pinterest notably went on the record with its diversity hiring goals for engineers, and released some hiring stats in a recent blog post. Intel has also shared its hiring targets and results.
It’s not the only new figure. Apple also broke out retail-specific data for the first time. Here’s the race/ethnicity data, which shows that retail leadership in the US is substantially less diverse than its staff:
And here’s the gender data:
Lastly, here’s the updated data big picture, which shows that the hiring so far has had a minuscule impact on the company’s total makeup:
The ratio of women to men at the company worldwide is now 31% to 69%, compared to 30% and 70% last year.