This June is a big month for Apple, with the company having hosted its annual Worldwide Developers’ Conference earlier in the month and preparing to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the iPhone on Thursday.
The decade since the iPhone’s release has seen Apple rocketing to even greater prominence, cementing its reputation as a powerful progressive company with significant international influence. Though its conference this year left some observers underwhelmed, Apple made sure to pay more lip service to gender equity, a key focus of its stated commitment to “inclusion & diversity.”
In a closed-press conversation with Michelle Obama at the conference, Apple Vice President Lisa Jackson said, “If we could, in our power today, diversify the sector, certainly Apple, certainly developers, we would.” Turning to Obama, Jackson asked the former first lady to “preach” to the choir and “tell us why we need women at the table.”
Apple’s website includes an entire page devoted to “Inclusion & Diversity,” trumpeting its achievements in hiring more female workers and allegedly closing the pay gap among its employees in the United States. “Creating an inclusive culture takes both commitment and action,” the site says. “We’re helping employees identify and address unconscious racial and gender bias.”
Commitment and action. Apple may have the former, but not so much the latter.
Today, only two members of Apple’s board of directors are women. Per its own reporting, a staggering 68 percent of its workforce was male in 2016, with women making up less than one in every three employees. Seventy-two percent of the company’s leaders are male, and 77 percent of Apple’s tech employees are men.
Last September, Mic revealed leaked emails from female employees at Apple complaining of a toxic, sexist work environment. Just this month during Apple’s WWCD, Mic calculated that women spoke for only nine minutes, as compared with men, who spoke for 117 minutes.
One can argue whether any of those numbers constitutes actual sexism. But it’s interesting that a company that places such an emphasis on the importance of gender diversity struggles so badly to live up to its own standards of equity. Paying lip service to the importance of women in leadership roles, as Lisa Jackson did earlier this month, but having 72 percent of people in leadership at your company be male and only two female board members is hypocritical, even if the company claims to be working on it.
I would argue that tech companies will always struggle to achieve “gender equity” because it’s naturally a field that women just aren’t interested in pursuing. And that’s OK. In an interview with the MIT Technology Review earlier this month, Apple CEO Tim Cook blamed society for labeling coding as a “boy thing” for tech’s inability to achieve gender equity and making it difficult for recruiters seeking to hire women out of college when the ratio of male-to-female graduates is so unbalanced. But, again, per its own reporting, even 69 percent of Apple’s retail employees are male.
Apple, a company so committed to progressive values that struggles so badly to hire women, is actually a valuable case study in workforce gender relations. One that its own leadership should take a look at before issuing hypocritical platitudes about the importance of gender diversity.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
