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Apple and Amazon refuse to make full federal workforce diversity data public

From Apple’s diversity microsite

Although Apple published its own employee diversity report back in August, USA Today reports that the company has refused to make public the full data from its federal diversity filing. While companies are required to file this information annually in a form known as EEO-1, they are not legally obliged to make the data public.

Facebook, eBay, Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn are among the technology companies that have made public their EEO-1s […]

Chief among the companies that decided not to disclose their EEO-1s were Microsoft, Twitter, Apple and Amazon.

When USA Today pressed the matter, Twitter released its filing and Microsoft agreed to do so by the end of the month, but Apple and Amazon did not respond … 

Stanford fellow Vivek Wadhwa, author of Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology, said that the companies have a responsibility to be accountable to the public for their hiring practices.

This refusal shows that they have something to hide. If they didn’t have anything to hide, they would come clean.

While Apple has not commented on the reason for its refusal, the piece notes that technology companies are critical of the EEO-1 form, complaining that its job classifications are a poor match for the tech industry. Intel’s chief diversity officer Rosalind Hudnell acknowledges this, but says that it is the best available measure at present.

“I hope everyone eventually shares their EEO-1s,” Hudnell said. “If we are going to commit as an industry to drive improvement in a collective fashion, we cannot do it with inconsistent data.”

Tim Cook has stated that he is not satisfied with Apple’s current diversity numbers, which show that Apple’s US workforce is 70% male and 55% white, and has a number of initiatives designed to address the issue. One of these is a number of $10k Inclusion and Diversity Scholarships for minorities in tech, another a film designed to emphasise the company’s commitment to diversity.

Tim Cook spoke of racial equality and gay rights in a speech in Alabama, and of course officially came out as gay shortly afterwards.

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Comments

  1. markbyrn (@markbyrn) - 9 years ago

    Does not respond does not mean refuse and perhaps Apple wasn’t interested in participating in a USA Today hit piece (damned if you do, damned if you don’t). The title should be Apple doesn’t respond to USA Today request. In that vein, I wonder if USA Today will ask the NBA why the players don’t seem to reflect racial in terms of percentages; I always figured they’re hiring the best players for the job as opposed to favoring one race. Maybe Apple does the same?

    • Dean Har - 9 years ago

      If you’re trying to make a good case against diversity, you probably should stay far away from athletics. If the wealthy wanted to dominate the NBA, know that they very well could. There aren’t many whites in the NBA simply because basketball typically isn’t the sport white parents want to pay for their kids to learn. But when you look at sports that require expensive equipment and coaching, you’ll find that the wealthy always dominate. That’s why Serena and Venus Williams (tennis) and Gabby Douglas (gymnastics) are such a big deal. Most families in their financial position don’t have the time or luxury to deal with the exorbitant costs of coaching, training, and traveling nor do they have the patience to deal with the financial and racial discrimination that comes along as a package deal. That’s actually the reason why Serena and Venus’s father stopped sending them to tournaments when they were kids. The racial discrimination, sadly from the parents (and most likely the kids as well), was too much for them to handle and ultimately not worth their time.

  2. Cai Copley - 9 years ago

    Why does it matter? Why should productivity be sacrificed for the “ideal” of “diversity”? What ever happened to the idea of “best person for the job”?

    • gen0music - 9 years ago

      What happened was you guys spent 300 years building the place using the best people for the job: slaves. Then you didn’t pay the African Americans back for what they built and worked because you couldn’t afford to if you wanted to. 50 years after you freed them, you’re already moaning about having to have them around?

      Look, smart black people actually aren’t that hard to find. Neither are dumb ones, but the difference is that it’s very hard to reward someone who works hard and get’s educated despite being pretty much forced to go to a lower performing school, and a lower performing college, and then is seen as “not the best person for the job” because he is not the closest to hand, lives in a bad area, is competing with people who went to a better school, or a host of other reasons that are either beyond his control or make him have to work disproportionately harder than his white peers to achieve the same thing.

      Today, the US segregates every race to their own area so that there are black schools and black colleges, black cities and black counties, all without breaking your own anti-racism laws. Yet you still have 80% of the wealth held by one race, and 25% of the other race are below the poverty line. I once told my boss about a (fictional) great IT admin born, raised and living in Compton who just needed a job to get out, and he almost laughed at the idea it was even possible. That’s why Affirmative Action exists.

      • sardonick - 9 years ago

        What a nice apologist answer. Bollocks. And for every “you people” there’s plenty of you people too.

      • gen0music - 7 years ago

        1. Your answer is as apologist as mine. In fact any answer that addresses AA is apologist.

        And for every “you people” there’s plenty of you people too is funny. Yes, there are 4 white people to every 1 black in the US, and 50 white controlled dollars to every 1 black dollar. So plenty isn’t even close.

  3. sardonick - 9 years ago

    Diversity. Tokens for the media. Worry more about “qualified” and less about “diverse”.

    • gen0music - 7 years ago

      Stop disallowing the skilled colored people from getting school places over less qualified white people and we might be able to talk. Until then I will still be an unqualified IT nerd that can code 3 different languages and cold-room reverse engineer a device driver to rewrite for a different OS, but can’t hand you a shiny piece of paper.

      Shiny pieces of paper cost money, not skills.

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Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Ben Lovejoy

Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!


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