Apple Releases Latest EEO-1 Diversity Report ⇥ reuters.com

Sai Sachin R, Reuters:¹

Apple Inc has made progress on boosting gender and racial diversity in its U.S. workforce, a regulatory document filed by the iPhone maker showed. […]

Apple added 1,475 black employees in the thirteen months ended Aug. 1, 31 percent more than a year earlier, the filing showed on Tuesday.

The company added 24 percent more Hispanic workers and 29 percent more Asians, compared with numbers reported in a July 2014 filing.

These numbers, while not spectacular, represent progress nevertheless. The EEO-1 is a confidential document; Apple is one of very few tech companies to make it public. And they’re getting shit for their results.

A couple of things do stand out, though. First, there are the numbers for women and executives:

About 30 percent of Apple’s U.S. employees were females as of August, compared with 28.7 percent.

Of the 103 executive and senior management positions, 86 were held by white employees, 12 by Asians, 4 by black employees and 1 by a hispanic, the document filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission showed.

That’s not brilliant.

Additionally, there are discrepancies between the EEO-1 figures and Apple’s self-reported numbers. Megan Rose Dickey, TechCrunch:

What’s odd is that, according to Cook, Apple hired more than 2,200 black employees in the U.S. over the last year, but the EEO-1 report says otherwise.

Recall that the EEO-1, as reported above, listed 1,475 black employee hires. It’s not an isolated case, either – Apple says that 28% of their executive employees are women, but their reporting shows that just 18 executive positions were held by women (PDF), or about 17%.

On their self-reporting page, Apple explains this discrepancy:

We make the document 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. We believe the information we report elsewhere on this site is a far more accurate reflection of our progress toward diversity.

They would not provide further clarification to Dickey, nor anyone else I could find. As the discrepancies are so significant, I hope for an official explanation as to how Apple’s counting differs from the required reporting standards. For women in leadership roles, it could perhaps be as simple as Apple counting retail managers while the federal standards may require those roles to be reported differently.