Apple boasts to have made 'progress' on latest diversity report
Apple is pushing its latest workforce diversity report as something of a progress report.
The Cupertino, Calif.-headquartered corporation published its latest demographics just a year and a day after the last one, and CEO Tim Cook displayed much more buoyancy in his accompanying letter this time.
Apple arguably made the most strides in closing its gender gap than elsewhere.
The iPhone maker hired more than 11,000 women globally, up 65 percent than in the previous year. Women also accounted for 35 percent of the new hires worldwide in the last year.
Nevertheless, Apple's global workforce is still overwhelmingly male, divided 69 percent male and 31 percent female. The progress looks minimal at best when compared to the 70/30 split at the end of June 2014.
The gender gap is still as glaring as ever when it comes to skilled tech jobs, skewing 79 percent male and 22 percent female by the end of June 2015.
Looking closer at ethnic backgrounds, Cook touted Apple hired more than 2,200 Black employees in the last year, up 50 percent from the previous year, as well as 2,700 Hispanic employees, a 66 percent increase.
Apple only broke out race and ethnicity figures for U.S. employee base -- 54 percent of which come from White backgrounds. Asian employees, the second most populous group, trailed at a distant 18 percent followed by Hispanic employees at 11 percent.
Nevertheless, Cook remained steadfastly optimistic that Apple will continue to make progress in hiring more applicants who are female and come from underrepresented backgrounds.
"Some people will read this page and see our progress," wrote Cook. "Others will recognize how much farther we have to go. We see both."