Apple Releases New Diversity Numbers, Hired Over 11,000 Women in Past Year

[richpjr]

Yeah, they've changed something. They wanted to hire more women, so they hired more women.

Now the question is, if the opposite were true, and Apple hired 66% less women this year, would you also assume discrimination against women as a default?

They are touting that they changed something. Why is it so hard for you to understand some people wonder WHAT changed and why?

As has been mentioned in this thread previously, the nursing profession is predominantly filled with females. If a hospital were to suddenly hire 66% male nurses, absolutely I would wonder why. And if they were doing it to level the diversity field it would be flat out gender discrimination. The questions raised are not hard to grasp, but if you want to be deliberately obtuse about it, that is your perogative.

 

[cfedu]

You cannot claim discrimination against an obvious majority, because if they were being discriminated against, they wouldn't be in the majority, now would they?

How did that work out for the blacks in South Africa before the 1990's

Women are in the majority in the USA, so they can't be discriminated against either. Next time I hear a feminist say that men make more money, or are over represented as CEO's I will just say.

You don't want to see the truth. You want to be a victim. You CRAVE it. And I don't want to play party to it anymore.

and

See, the real problem is you're freaking out over absolutely nothing.

and

wailing oh woe is me over how unfair life under a capitalosocalicryptofashicommunist reign of tyranny (cuz goddamn that sounded snappy in that book we read one time) while tears gently roll down our cheeks, pitter pattering on our hope chests.

This is easier than debating with a new earth Creationist it truly is, it's been fun!!!

 

[Renzatic]

As has been mentioned in this thread previously, the nursing profession is predominantly filled with females. If a hospital were to suddenly hire 66% male nurses, absolutely I would wonder why.

No. I just wouldn't give a damn. Certainly, it'd be interesting to find out why exactly, but only for the sake of pure academics. Though if there's a push to get more men in the nursing field, I guess we'd know exactly why.

If more men want to be nurses, then more men can be nurses. The same is true of women in tech and STEM fields. Assuming either gained their position primarily through pity and/or for political reasons is a bit insulting to everyone involved, isn't it?

 

[cfedu]

They are touting that they changed something. Why is it so hard for you to understand some people wonder WHAT changed and why?

As has been mentioned in this thread previously, the nursing profession is predominantly filled with females. If a hospital were to suddenly hire 66% male nurses, absolutely I would wonder why. And if they were doing it to level the diversity field it would be flat out gender discrimination. The questions raised are not hard to grasp, but if you want to be deliberately obtuse about it, that is your perogative.

Yes it would, imagine is that 66% represented 100% of male graduates and the remaining 34% females represented 10% of the female graduates? could I say "suck it up cry me a river, why don't you become an orderly and stop claiming you are a victim".

 

[Renzatic]

How did that work out for the blacks in South Africa before the 1990's

If this were me saying the above quote in the context of this thread, I'd feel deeply ashamed of myself immediately after posting it.

...but that's me.

 

[cfedu]

If this were me saying the above quote in the context of this thread, I'd feel deeply ashamed of myself immediately after posting it.

...but that's me.

You should feel ashamed for saying it.

You cannot claim discrimination against an obvious majority, because if they were being discriminated against, they wouldn't be in the majority, now would they?

Majority populations have been discriminated throughout history. The majority Shia in Iraq were persecuted by the SUNI under Saddam Hussain. Indians by the British, Vietnamese by the french, and so on.

A statement like yours trivializes past suffering of peoples and it's important that we never make the mistakes of the past. You seem to support making the same mistakes of the past to actively discriminate against men.

..but that's me.

 

[richpjr]

Assuming either gained their position primarily through pity and/or for political reasons is a bit insulting to everyone involved, isn't it?

I didn't assume anything. I merely raised the point that the numbers seem very out of the ordinary given the gender percentages in the field. How you keep trying to twist that into somehow being insulting to people is a strange leap in logic that has nothing to do with what was posted nor intended.

 

[Renzatic]

I didn't assume anything. I merely raised the point that the numbers seem very out of the ordinary given the gender percentages in the field. How you keep trying to twist that into somehow being insulting to people is a strange leap in logic that has nothing to do with what was posted nor intended.

I'm probably unfairly lumping you in with everyone else. As you can see from the Apartheid (and now Iraq) quip above, I'm arguing with you alongside, well...

 

[mrsir2009]

Consistency. If I can't decide I want to hire men in preference to women, you can't decide to hire women in preference to men, no matter what euphemisms you hide your preference in.

Oh, I certainly think companies should be able to do it both ways -- if they want more men rather than women, go for it. I'm guessing a lot of people would disagree with me though.

 

[downpour]

This is pointless unless they show breakdown of people 'applying' for jobs.

 

[lowendlinux]

That was an interesting 19 pages

 

[CFreymarc]

You could be correct, but hiring for the best team could be used as a great way to introduce discrimination. If a woman who is more qualified does not get hired or a promotion, the employer can just say "we do not hire based on the best candidates we hire who us best for the team."

This is a very subjective statement. We are living in a political environment of hyper equality that IMO is more aimed at eliminating the most talented and able in our society than promoting equality. There is an old political joke called the "handicapper general" who's time has come again. In this Interet age, the right meme's will have the HG rise like the Phoenix.

 

[VulchR]

Yes, it couldn't possibly be that computing changed or the fact that male interest increased around the same time the PC and video game industry picked up. It's shame some people can't accept women's decisions if they don't fit their own world view. My daughter chose to switch majors from biochem to education after she volunteered with children for a summer and felt it would be a more rewarding career even if it paid less. It's a shame people like you will think less of her for it all under the guise of "equality"...

I am an educator, and most of my family are (going back 3 generations, from one-room school teachers to university professors in education). I do not think less of anybody who decides to teach, and I am not sure where you got that idea. In any case, are you arguing that video games can only interest males and there is no market for video games for females (that is, the majority on the planet)? I agree historically that the proportion of women went down after video games picked up, but not all computing is about video games and in any case this could be viewed as the inevitable outcome of of an industry dominated by males that makes and markets products for males because women are not represented. Given that this is a suboptimal strategy not just for video games but for computing in general, since the majority of people are female, Apple seems to be trying to buck this trend. My guess is they'll be more successful because it is good business sense.

The problem is that's a subjective report. I know many women for whom less than fawning approval from men is deemed hostile. Computer geeks are notorious for treating women exactly like they treat men, which is to say cold and aloof much of the time, and for many women that would indeed feel hostile and isolating. It is not actual hostility.

Yes, women's complaints about how male colleagues in the computing industry treat them are subjective. And if this reflects that males in the industry treat all people with disdain or outright hostility, then perhaps makes males bad employees because they are toxic to the working environment.

How many men in the computing industry have complained about their treatment by women? [crickets]

When we start to look at what college classes women take, it shows they don't participate very much in hard sciences like: computer science, engineering, physics & mathematics. So that shows the opposite of what your saying. It has less to do with discrimination and more to do with women's choices. Most women gear their careers toward professions that deal with people: Social workers, psychologists, health care, teachers ect.

Women's choices are shaped in part by how welcome they are made to feel, just like any group of people. A quick Google search revealed this source, which used high-quality, publicly available data to make the following plot of women's participation various sciences (as measured by proportion of bachelor's degrees awarded to women in the given field). Computer science stands out like a sore thumb, and arguing that everything is OK is truly sticking one's head in the sand:

 

[extricated]

If those 11,000 women were the best qualified for the job, then good for them.
If not ... it sucks for customers because that means the best candidates won't be the ones contributing to the future of Apple.

 

[greytmom]

You are quoting a playbook response that suppressed individual creativity and imagination for the "society balance" that every socialist has used since Wells published Utopia.

No, I'm quoting real life use case here. I do this for a living.

But, something tells me that you don't really care about reality.

 

[greytmom]

What you describe is pure discrimination.

You might just as well have said, "All things being equal, discriminate."

Except that non-minorities aren't a protected class.

Please, tell me the reason that if equally qualified, a company SHOULD choose an under-40 white male over a woman, or a black person, or an Asian, etc.

 

[greytmom]

Exactly.

The one thing you can be sure of if you work at Apple is that any women or non-white may not be there because of merit. Therefore, the wise course of action will be to cast a second and third eye over the work of any of these hires.

To be on the safe side, they will need to delegate the most important work to white males only, as they will be the only people they can be sure will have earned their place at Apple on merit alone.

Ah ha! I've never really understood why you were here, but now I see.

 

[aaronvan]

Except that non-minorities aren't a protected class.

Minorities are a "protected class?"

 

[Eraserhead]

Exactly.

The one thing you can be sure of if you work at Apple is that any women or non-white may not be there because of merit. Therefore, the wise course of action will be to cast a second and third eye over the work of any of these hires.

To be on the safe side, they will need to delegate the most important work to white males only, as they will be the only people they can be sure will have earned their place at Apple on merit alone.

Please interviews are hardly the be all and end all.

 

[laurim]

I understand what Tim is trying to do but the problem traces back to the education system. I work for a huge corporation and our IT dept is 80-85% male (very diversified: Asian, blacks, whites, Spanish, European, etc) with the rest of the women doing user training, project management and a few in managerial positions.

Even when we ask the recruiter to specifically send us women for very technical positions in networking, telephony and software development the numbers that we see are minuscule. In my case, when I graduated there was this stigma of IT being boring and difficult so I don't have an answer on how we can improve the odds of more women in IT.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be a chemist. It was a done deal. Until a group of women engineers came to my high school and talked with all the girls about it. I changed to wanting to be an engineer because it meant more money and being at a management level right out of college. Until then, I had no idea of the difference. People need role models to get advice from, people they can relate to and ask questions about things unique to their experience. White men have had this forever so they will never understand what it's like to not have it (hence the anti-diversity comments here). Thinking tech is a guy's domain is so ingrained in people that even female HR reps need a push to try a little harder to take women more seriously and to overcome their ingrained biases. Cripes, even women in my own family will ask a guy to look at their computer before they will ask me and they know damn well I'm good with computers and do AV for a living now. It's only after the men fail that I get a chance to fix things (and I do).

There is also value in making sure a company has a diverse set of viewpoints in the workplace so it makes MONETARY sense to have a diverse workplace. It's not just doing women and minorities a favor. It's good for everyone.

 

[laurim]

Maybe we should just let women choose what they want to do with their lives? If they don't want to be in IT, let them do something else. Why does it matter to anyone else what they choose to do with their lives? Hell, if a woman wants to be a housewife, then I say, why not? Sorry if that last point is blasphemy...

Most women aren't in STEM jobs because they aren't exposed to the possibilities when they are growing up or are steered out of them along the way. It's well-proven that girls are better than boys at math and science up to a certain grade and then right around puberty they fall off, probably due to wanting to be more attractive and less intimidating to the boys, who can't handle the "smart girl". Girls constantly get the message that being dumber and weaker is the way to attract a guy, and no matter what you guys might say to the contrary, that is generally true. I CONSTANTLY hear men I work with complain about how their wives are so helpless around the house and can't deal with getting things repaired, etc. etc. And I notice how much attention I get from guys when I play the "help me with this" game. But I can't stomach pretending to be helpless for long....

This is one reason I applaud Target for removing the gender labels on toys in their stores. Might make people think a little harder about what Jenny WANTS to play with rather than hitting the "girls" toys aisle and picking out anything under $25. I know the only reason I got dolls instead of the race car set I really wanted was because of gender bias expectations. Thankfully, my parents started asking me what I wanted and I got a microscope and model rocket kits as presents later.

 

[laurim]

As are the race-baiters it seems.

"race-baiting" == pointing out to oblivious white people that the races aren't treated fairly yet

 

[laurim]

And that is a bad thing because… ?

wow. you are so clueless.

 

[greytmom]

Minorities are a "protected class?"

Yep. See Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Also, here's a link that you may find helpful.

 

[laurim]

It disgusts me the fact that the race (or whatever they want to call it now) is not all 100% "undeclared".

I've never understood the "I'm 2% navajo, 7% french, 3% sirian, 9% japanese and the rest is pure american". What's with this constant obsesion with races in the US?

As Morgan Freeman once said...

Maybe we think about our heritage so much because the vast majority of us come from people born in another country and those people from other countries marry each other in America. I'm proud to know that I am 7/8 german and 1/8 swedish and wish I knew more about my distant relatives. It's just trivia and something to compare in casual conversation. And it guides me in my travel interests. I think I have a job in Copenhagen next year and plan to visit my Swedish roots after the job is done. People in America are proud that we are a "melting pot". Only a few idiots see it as a way to be divisive and hateful.