Workforce diversity seems to be a topic of interest in the tech industry lately, and Apple is the latest to pitch in with a breakdown of its employee stats.
What Apple revealed is that its U.S. workforce is primarily white, and male -- in about the same ratio as its tech brethren, or sisters.
Apple joins LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and others in releasing diversity figures.
Apple's workforce consists of 70 percent men, 30 percent females. Ethnically, it breaks down to 55 percent white, 15 percent Asian, 11 percent Hispanic, 7 percent black, 2 percent mixed race, and 9 percent undeclared. Their figures include employees of their retail stores.
Google, the company that got this round of mea culpa started, stated that its male-to-female ratio also stood at 70-30.
Facebook stepped up to the plate with a 69-31 m-to-f ratio. Facebook, though, reported the highest percentage of Asian employees at 41 percent, above LinkedIn's 38 percent and Yahoo's 39 percent. Google claims that Asians comprise 30 percent of its workforce.
In terms of whiteness, Facebook claims 57 percent of its workforce is Caucasian, Google puts that figure at 61 percent, Twitter at 59 percent.
Those numbers rise at the leadership level. At Apple, 72 percent of its executives and managers are male, and 64 percent of those are white. At the leadership level, Apple's percentage of Asians also rises to 21 percent. Twitter reports that 72 percent of its leaders are male, with 79 percent of those are white. Yahoo says that 77 percent of its leaders are male.
Another trend that runs straight through the reported data from all companies is the extended gap between men and women when jobs are broken down into tech and non-tech categories. For example, Twitter reports that 90 percent of its tech workforce is male, while 50 percent of its non-tech workers are female. At Apple, the numbers are 80 percent and 35 percent, respectively. Yahoo claims that while 62 percent of its total workforce is male, its tech workforce is 85 percent male.
The widening gap in gender for tech vs. non-tech positions is something that Google is trying to ameliorate by investing $50 million into a Made with Code program that honors influential women in computer science and provides resources to other programs that encourage diversity in coding training.
All of the companies that have released their findings have expressed disappointment at the results, and have pledged a renewed effort to improve both race and gender diversity within their companies.
