Apple Adds Five Vice Presidents, Including Two Women, to 'Apple Leadership' Press Page

[Parasprite]

Good god. I refuse to read that novel you just wrote, but I'm sure it had some good stuff in there. You might wanna go outside.

It took less than two minutes to read and I'm even outside.

Either way she makes a lot of good points and it is actually worth reading, particularly in the context of his thread.

 

[jolux]

It took less than two minutes to read and I'm even outside.

Either way she makes a lot of good points and it is actually worth reading, particularly in the context of his thread.

Unfortunately the cacophony of racist, sexist, (possibly out of ignorance, that's the most likely these days) and misogynist remarks in this thread mean that not a lot of people are willing to listen to logic and reason. If they were, they wouldn't have the same beliefs that they do.

It's like religion. Equally important but just as pointless to argue about with people over the internet who don't listen to what you have to say and go into an argument having already convinced themselves that their opinion will not change.

 

[DUCKofD3ATH]

Right, becuase your methods and experiences are obviously the objective universal standard.

And you're so biased it doesn't even occur to you to make the same comment to the person I'm replying to.

At least I have the benefit of long years of experience in hiring people. How much do you have or Radio?

 

[DUCKofD3ATH]

Be that as it may, now it's 2014 and apparently perfectly legal to suggest that only white males belong in computer, technology and pro hockey. What a long way we've come. What a long flippin' way we have to go, baby.

This is what your post boils down to: axe to grind.

First, nobody I've read "suggests that only white males belong in computer, technology", so if you've got a quote backing up your otherwise hysterically funny claim, please produce it.

Second, why should it be illegal to make the suggestion anyway? You wanna get a job with the Thought Police next? Hear they're hiring.

Here's a suggestion: you'll balance so much better without that chip on your shoulder.

 

[IbisDoc]

I'm always amazed at how much liberal racism and misogyny exists in the U.S., and even more amazed at how they've suckered everyone into believing that only conservatives possess those traits.

 

[noodlemanc]

Be that as it may, now it's 2014 and apparently perfectly legal to suggest that only white males belong in computer, technology and pro hockey. What a long way we've come. What a long flippin' way we have to go, baby.

Well I certainly hope it doesn't become illegal for people to say whatever that want.

 

[LizKat]

Good god. I refuse to read that novel you just wrote, but I'm sure it had some good stuff in there. You might wanna go outside.

Blush. Got me, although I was outside at the time. But that was pretty long winded even for me. Everyone could use an editor now and then. All your fault for not being there to say "Cut, that's a wrap..." after 140 characters

It took less than two minutes to read and I'm even outside.

Either way she makes a lot of good points and it is actually worth reading, particularly in the context of his thread.

Thank you. Not sure it was worth reading but it was worth writing because to have remained silent would have felt like I was agreeing that tech companies (and hockey teams etc.) should remain chockablock with white guys, which (no matter how talented they are) is not how I see it.

This is what your post boils down to: axe to grind.

First, nobody I've read "suggests that only white males belong in computer, technology", so if you've got a quote backing up your otherwise hysterically funny claim, please produce it.

Second, why should it be illegal to make the suggestion anyway? You wanna get a job with the Thought Police next? Hear they're hiring.

Here's a suggestion: you'll balance so much better without that chip on your shoulder.

First of all, please re-read your own post.

Second, I don't dispute the legality of free speech hailing status quo as acceptable for the future, at least in many circumstances. Say what you like (as you did, and I have done). otoh it might not be legal to state to an applicant that the position for which he's applying has always been held by a certain type of person -- racial characteristic, gender, etc.-- and to suggest that therefore, a change is unlikely. That would depend on the circumstance as well but your average corporate lawyer would have a fit if a Human Resources interviewer even started to go there.

Third. I don't have a chip on my shoulder. I've pointed out some facts your post seemed not to be aware of in terms of how this country has changed over the years. When you point that "chip on shoulder" finger at me, some of your fingers may be pointing back at yourself?

I do believe we've come a long way since my grandmother was a little girl and asked her mom what it meant about "Irish need not apply" for a sales clerk's job in a retail dress shop. And we've certainly come a long way since that Texas diner owner refused to serve the Mexican immigrant he thought I was when I tried to order a cheeseburger. But from my own experience and the publicly available information anyone can glean about job discrimination and other forms of racial profiling and stereotyping in the USA even today, it's clear that we have a long, long way to go to overcome the mistaken idea that any occupation --or avocation-- should remain the purview of white males (or any other group of people).

Women still do not get the same pay as a man for the same work, for instance. We may have come far since the mid-60s, when a white male analyst and I were offered "the same job" at a Citibank precursor; he to make $100 a week and have half the time of a clerk to do his typing, I to make $75 per week if I could type 80 words per minute and do my own reports. Of course that meant "the same job" was not in fact the same job. We compared notes later (having been college classmates) and both refused to take that job. It was only marginally a legal way to process applications for that single job opening even then, since the EEO act had already passed. Even so, women now still make less than men for the same job, according to stats maintained by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's not having a chip on the shoulder to know that such inequality is wrong.

Mind you, I am not suggesting that you would think that was okay. But how we get towards equality is a mind set: understanding that same work is same work and deserves same pay. It seems that we have not arrived there yet. And I think we're not there yet when it's still common to see "that's just how it is" as a rationalization for why some job categories are staffed solely by white male employees. Similarly we're not there yet when it's still common to see relatively few women or people of color in executive positions and ALSO common to assume, and to say, that they're there because it resolves "diversity problems." That's not how they got there.

The goals of hiring on merit (qualifications, performance) are hallmarks of democracy and worth striving for. We cannot reach them without ensuring that all in our democracy have that equal opportunity to be considered and are not hindered from personal and professional development just because they are not white and male. How can we do that without working towards changing attitudes about the past? It's not just about legalities, it's about attitudes. It's legal to have an attitude towards women or blacks in the workplaces that used to be all white, but it's not useful because it doesn't really serve anyone well not in our society, our economy, our future. The world is diverse. The USA is diverse. Its economy is diverse. Diversity is here to stay. How to get comfortable with it is to let go of the idea that what was status quo has to stay status quo. "Evolve or die" is not without some down home truth to it.

Well I certainly hope it doesn't become illegal for people to say whatever that want.

Me too, short of anyone's incitement to burn down the house we all live in, and the MacRumors moderators will stop us short of that! I think what people want to say can change over time. But not if they're saying it on autopilot. Open debate is a good thing, it makes us consider what we've said, and maybe find new viewpoints now and then.

 

[noodlemanc]

Even so, women now still make less than men for the same job, according to stats maintained by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's not having a chip on the shoulder to know that such inequality is wrong.

I assume you're not talking about the "women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes" statistic, which isn't very accurate as it doesn't take into account time off to give birth or different choices in careers etc.

When you compare young women to young men (both without children), the women are actually making more in a lot of cases:

Figures show that women aged between 22 and 29 in employment are now earning more on average per hour than men of the same age.

The figures were unearthed by Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of the Universities and Colleges Admission Service, during research into the gender gap in education.

The women's lead in the pay stakes is still only slight – their median hourly pay is now just over £10 an hour compared with just under £10 an hour for men. But it reverses a historic trend. Ms Curnock Cook contrasted the findings with figures from 1997 which showed the opposite.

---

It is only among older workers – 40- to 49-year-olds, many of whom would have left school before the explosion in women's qualifications began – that men remain significantly ahead of women, earning just over £14 per hour on average while women earn just £12.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8803019/Young-women-now-earning-more-than-men.html

While women in general and at every education level still earn far less than men, younger women have jumped ahead of their male counterparts. For example, between 2006 and 2008, the median salary for a woman with a bachelor's degree was 33% lower than the salary of a man with the same degree: $39,571 compared to $59,079. But single, childless women between the ages of 22 and 30 earned on average 8% more than men in that age range in most U.S. cities in 2008.

Source: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/09/01/young-single-women-earn-more-than-men/

 

[LizKat]

I had not read those pieces, they're interesting, and thanks for posting the links!

The second one does note "However, across all age groups, women executives are still paid 25 per cent less than men, the study found."

But as time goes on, it looks like women are managing to get better qualified AND better recognition of their performance. This is good news, especially if it persists as the younger generations move up the ladders of management, and I hope it will be reflected in the experiences of people of color and other minorities as well.

One thing I wonder about is whether this laggy economic recovery may undo progress towards equality of prospects for everyone. It's starting to sound like equal opportunity to get shafted is the latest trend. I have young nieces and nephews who report that so many offerings are for unpaid internships, or part-time jobs with insane work schedules : "Clopening" fast food places where you work the tail end of the late shift to close the shop and come back four or five hours later to open the place in the first shift, wow... What's next, shaping the burgers at home and getting paid by the piece when you bring the box into the job? Could make assembling T-shirts seem desirable.

Another relative reports having to supervise increasingly unhappy home health aides whose hours have been cut by upper management to reduce cost of benefits, but who must still give the same number of showers per month, and make sure the assorted other regulations are still met in order for the agency not to be charged with fraud. One wonders who exactly is defrauding whom with stuff like that.

Maybe the one truly equal opportunity in employment today is to find out that your labor is merely a burdensome production cost the same as a sack of potatoes or copper fittings. Getting the cost --all the costs-- down is key for the bosses. This attitude has always been the case to some extent but never before have I seen it so blatantly expressed, and executed with so little fear of being brought up on labor-rights charges.

 

[noodlemanc]

I had not read those pieces, they're interesting, and thanks for posting the links!

The second one does note "However, across all age groups, women executives are still paid 25 per cent less than men, the study found."

But as time goes on, it looks like women are managing to get better qualified AND better recognition of their performance. This is good news, especially if it persists as the younger generations move up the ladders of management, and I hope it will be reflected in the experiences of people of color and other minorities as well.

Yes, there's been a trend for quite some time now (since the late 90s, I believe) of more women graduating from university than men -- and the results of that trend are now being seen in the workforce. The problem is that a lot of people lump 50 year old married women with three kids in with 25 year old single women with no kids and use the resulting statistics to claim that women are being underpaid.

 

[Born Again]

I'm white, and I'm all about more Samoans in the work place. Not only are they a people, they're also a cookie.

Lol

Okay seriously back to topic..

----------

Oh so now people hire their FRIENDS is that it? Got news for you, you don't have a clue on the matter. I been hiring people for nearly 25 years and have yet to interview someone I knew, let alone a friend.

I like your hiring tactics

 

[LizKat]

Yes, there's been a trend for quite some time now (since the late 90s, I believe) of more women graduating from university than men -- and the results of that trend are now being seen in the workforce. The problem is that a lot of people lump 50 year old married women with three kids in with 25 year old single women with no kids and use the resulting statistics to claim that women are being underpaid.

But the 50-year old w/ 3 kids who's a company's vice president is still likely to be making not more than 75% of what her male counterpart is making. That was even mentioned in one of the pieces you cited. Sometimes the reason offered for that gap is the time away from workforce while the children are young, but in highly paid executive jobs, daycare or the nanny is deployed after the brief maternity leave and it's back to work as usual, so it doesn't seem to me that such a woman is missing enough time on job to justify the haircut in pay.

If you're talking about other than executive level jobs, and not liking the averaging of stats over this time frame we're in now, where more woman have become more qualified for better, say tech, jobs but older women are still dragging down the newer numbers, I would agree. We cannot undo the past, only try to improve on it going forward. The effect of all the world's yesterdays in the workplace for each generation tends to reverberate for one's working lifetime. That's one of the big problems for youngsters coming out of school as the crash of 2008 continued to take its toll. They'll never really catch up unless they get the luck of the draw AND are very accomplished in their education and whatever CV they've managed to put together so far.

What I found pretty alarming in one of the links you provided was this: "Atlanta boasted the greatest disparity in pay, with young, childless women paid 121% of what their male counterparts earn, according to Reach Advisors. But that's still far less than the 150% of women's pay that men with bachelor degrees were getting."

That suggests that we're making progress as far as educating women and getting them qualified for better jobs is concerned, but we're not providing enough "blue collar" types of manufacturing jobs (which used to be the first stop for young unmarried men who did not attend college) and we're still not paying college educated women what college-educated men are making.

If we're not going to create enough good blue-collar jobs then we have to get guys to stay the course in college and graduate! Either that or do a better job of showing guys some opportunities for good vocational training (as opposed to scam vocational training, of which there seems plenty). It's hard to find good welders, or good diesel mechanics. Not everyone wants to go to college, or is suited to it. Here in the US, we don't reach into high schools with higher-end vocational training and apprenticeship offers the way some European countries do. It's too bad; a huge waste of the country's human capital and an aggravator of the gap between rich and poor.

 

[brdeveloper]

How? Diversity is a crock of _ _ _ _ that was made up to make people feel bad.... You hire the people who are qualified and who are right for the job. This Diversity crap is what's wrong with todays USA. If the person is white, black, yellow, green, blue... You hiring the one who is qualified. You don't hiring the black one because you need more diversity. Same goes for sex.

What if you're not hiring some people just because they don't look qualified to you? This "don't look" feeling can be mitigated with diversity, so there are chances that your company will hire truly qualified people in the future, since it's are able to find qualities in a professional that a uniform point of view can't notice.

 

[mono1980]

Except. How would you feel if somebody else that was less qualified than you got a job you’d worked damned hard and damned long for just because it was diverse?

I HIGHLY doubt that Apple hired anyone with less qualifications just because of their race or sex. There are lots of people with the same qualifications out there and Apple is free to choose whoever they feel will be the best fit.

 

[CFreymarc]

This is just rhetoric. They do the same job and just given a new title.

 

[Ugg]

Hey. "How things are" at some point in time does not detemine the future! How lucky we are in not being bound to yesterday.

If that were the case, depending on how far you like to roll back the clock, let's say 1945, we'd still have milk delivered in glass bottles in wooden crates at the crack of dawn by distributors driving their horse and wagon delivery gig into our driveways. Maybe you'd like that but you wouldn't like a lot of other stuff about 1945. We'd still have rations on sugar, butter, nylon, etc.

Want to go back further for "how things are" as predictor of how they'd be?

Maybe it would be 1910 and your mom, sister or wife could not vote, own property independently, acquire credit on her own, take care of her family if something subtracted the man in her life from her safety net. There was no safety net. The kindness of strangers, period.

Maybe it would be 1948 and your mom who worked riveting airplanes together for the Air Force had already been told to get back into the kitchen and stay out of the way. She's a widow now, right, but hey, the war's over and life moves on, her problem is her problem, her kids are her problem, and the solution to the nation's unemployment is to hire only white men. Talk about putting toothpaste back into the tube (not that the effort is not ongoing, as your post would seem to indicate).

Or maybe it would be 1920 and perfectly acceptable to say "Help Wanted, Irish Need Not Apply" in a job ad in the store window.

Maybe it would be 1960 and still be perfectly legal for that jerk Texas diner owner to tell me "I don't serve Mex here" after his casual and incorrect assessment of my suntan as marker of my racial heritage. Took my green money and flashing him an inch of pale belly skin to turn my face white enough for him. I was hungry in the USA with money in pocket that day and I'll never forget the near despair I felt. I had earned that money working in the back of my Dad's shop sorting plumbing fixtures, standing side by side with people who were white, French-Canadian, black and German. No one there said anything about anybody being any color. I was shocked in Texas. I'm still a nonviolent person but somewhere in my heart that day in Texas, I was permanently radicalized on the subject of equality of personhood.

Be that as it may, now it's 2014 and apparently perfectly legal to suggest that only white males belong in computer, technology and pro hockey. What a long way we've come. What a long flippin' way we have to go, baby.

When I first started working as a computer programmer, I was the only woman in my company who knew anything about computer programming. No one said we couldn't get more female programmers, or could only hire male programmers. So I guess by your standards it was a company seriously burdened by some foolish drive to tokenize? I call BS. They wanted expertise, I had it and I got the job. I delivered, I got paid, they were sorry when I left and they said so too.

At the time it's true that a few remarks were passed about how I was making a whole lot more money than any other women in the company. And it's true the other women in the company were a receptionist, a bookkeeper, an accountant and a secretary. The firm was small, a bunch of investment counselors. They were all white males, mostly from Princeton educations. All that has long since changed, there and certianly in any publicly held company that plans to stay in business in the USA today.

I left that little firm many decades ago but in the meantime the places I've worked that have made plenty money for their shareholders all have employees from all walks of life and every corner of the earth. Collectively they've been like any other group of people. Some wonderful to know and work with, others a real pain in the neck. Individually, likewise.

People are people. The more diverse crew on board, the better as far as my experience has taught me. The more women and people in color (and younger people) in high places, the less unusual it is and the more normal it is to be working for someone who's not just like we are, and the more normal it is to focus on getting the job done, product out the door, new ideas onto drawing boards, money coming into the place and so into our pockets. We all want to have the means to have shelter overhead, enough food, a way to take care of our families and follow our dreams. When we work together, that's what we're working for. It's worth remembering. Every day. Every minute. The man or woman across the table or desk is in that same boat with us.

It's the places that resist the dynamics of diversity that end up stuck in unhappy limbos of their own making. Places that look the other way when women or minorities are harassed. Places that tolerate racist remarks, sexual innunendos and on and on. First of all they're looking for lawsuits and second, they're unhappy, tense places to work. They don't draw the cream of the cream. Word gets around what they're like. They short themselves on ability to find and develop talent. And yes, they generate pools of people who complain about diversity and spread myths about stuff like only men being geeks and techies and women being too catty to manage other people.

My advice? Get with the program. Find the best in everyone you meet on the job and let old attitudes fade away. Your networking chances will improve a hundred percent immediately.

Thank you.

It is only through our stories that other people can understand how far we have come and realize how far we have to go.