Emails leaked by Apple employees are said to reveal the alleged sexist and toxic work environment in the company, a picture which is not good for a company that claims it is making good progress in its workforce diversity.
The extensive report, published by Mic, started with an incident involving a female Apple employee. Danielle, not hear real name, works on a team made up of mostly males in the company, similar to how most of the teams in Apple are set up.
In a certain morning of July, the men started joking about an office intruder who would come to rape everybody. Hearing the jokes, Danielle spoke out, and while the coworker who started the jokes apologized and promised not to say such things again, she was not confident that things will change.
This is because this is not the first time that Danielle saw something like that happen, and despite numerous complaints to her manager, no improvements were made.
Danielle raised her complaint the following day to the CEO of Apple himself, Tim Cook, writing "I do not feel safe at a company that tolerates individuals who make rape jokes."
Cook, however, did not respond to the formal complaint lodged by Danielle, a copy of which was acquired by Gizmodo. The female employee was given a month off, but upon her return, she found that no serious consequences were triggered by her complaint.
The incident with Danielle is just one of many stories of employees who are all claiming to have been the victim of the sexist and toxic atmosphere at the company. The writer of the report, Melanie Ehrenkranz, claims that she has acquired 50 pages of emails from former and current employees at Apple, all of which reveal that there is a problem on how women are being treated within Apple.
One of the incidents saw a female employee sit through a meeting wherein the male attendees stereotyped women as nags. The employee was the only woman in the meeting.
In another incident, Claire, not her real name, reported that her male colleagues were harassing her. However, instead of addressing what was said to be a hostile working environment, Claire was given the option of either staying put or take a demotion to be moved to another team. Claire took the second option.
Amanda, also not her real name, said that she was not given the chance to apply for two higher positions, despite being qualified for them, as her male boss selected two men for the jobs, which were not publicly posted.
Amanda, who filed a complaint with Department of Fair Employment and Housing, also sent an email to Cook, similar to what Danielle did. Also similarly, Cook did not reply to her email.
Apple did not comment on any of the incidents in the report, but a spokeswoman said that the company takes work environment complaints very seriously and that it investigates each incident thoroughly.
In its latest workforce diversity report, Apple said that it has solved the pay gap between genders, with a slight increase to 32 percent for the women population of its employees. However, with the incidents reported by Ehrenkranz, it seems that there is a deeper and more toxic issue beneath Apple's workforce.
