Apple’s diversity report shows the company has made small strides in hiring more women and minorities, but it still has a long way to go to move away from a white-male-dominated company.
The report, which takes information from June 2014 to June 2015, shows that Apple hired 66% more Hispanic workers, 50% more black employees and 65% more women globally over the last year. However, these numbers only amount to a 1% growth for female and black employees overall. The overall percentage of Hispanics stayed at 11%.
In a letter in conjunction with the report, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, said the company hired around 11,000 women and 628 black employees globally. The company has a total of more than 98,000 permanent full-time employees worldwide. Cook also said that 50% of the employees the company has hired so far in 2015 have been women or minorities.
“Diversity is critical to innovation and it is essential to Apple’s future,” Cook said in the letter. “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.”
See the graphs below for a full breakdown.
Cook admits his company still has a lot of work to do when it comes to diversity, but he stressed his commitment to the issue. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company has pledged $40 million to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund to identify and develop engineering talent from historically black colleges. Apple also has given $10 million to the National Center of Women and Information Technology and $100 million to underserved schools via the ConnectED program.
So far in 2015, Apple has invested $650 million in minority- and female-owned businesses.
