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Apple Blocks Internal Discussions of Salary and Equality, a Potentially Illegal Move, According to Lawyers

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Apple's Workforce numbers, overall. 34% female, 66% male. Apple’s diversity numbers are lackluster. Even if we’re willing to give Apple some benefit of the doubt that their troubles in engineering revolve around the pipeline problem, that is, there just aren’t enough diverse candidates coming down the pipeline with technical skills, then they still have very few women in non-technical roles and even fewer in leadership. Their numbers of Black employees and other non-white employees aren’t much better. Now, I’d love to talk about how the pipeline problem is actually more a problem of refusing to draw from a diverse pool of candidates and instead relying on the same measures that made your workforce so homogeneous, but that’s a discussion for another time. Instead, we’re going to talk about the employees within Apple trying to make the company work better for everyone, and how Apple’s trying to squash that.

Companies often hate when employees start talking to each other about pay inequality. They know their companies are rife with pay inequality. Unchecked misogyny and racism, homophobia and transphobia, through microaggressions or outright hate, leads to employers paying non-white and non-male employees worse than everyone else. They hate when that’s pointed out because it could lead to increased compensation across the board and lawsuits. It also gets in the way of their image of being progressive.

However, blocking those discussions is also illegal, and now Apple could be in hot water with its own employees.

Preventing Discussions

Apple has shut down at least three internal surveys over the past few weeks. These surveys asked employees about returning to work and vaccination status, but also, pay equity. They asked employees to voluntarily share information about their pay, bonuses, gender, race, disability, and, in one survey, vaccination status. Apple shut all three surveys down, claiming that they reveal personally identifying information (PII). However, demographics aren’t PII. Even if demographics could reveal a person’s exact identity (because Apple hires so few women or minorities at particular levels), employees are allowed to discuss salaries. There’s no security reason to shut down these conversations over any of these demographics or vaccination status. In fact, in a less politicized world, companies often touted internally how many of their employees signed up for a free flu shot.

Apple claims that employees can get this information from their own People and Diversity and Inclusion teams. However, employees believe Apple’s shutting down these investigations specifically because they’d allow finer insight into Apple’s figures; that Apple has something to hide.

External Survey

Cher Scarlett, a former Blizzard employee who now works in Apple’s security department, isn’t happy with Apple’s efforts to stop employee organizing and pay discussions. She set up a survey off of Apple’s servers, protecting it with a password on her Slack. Those outside of Apple won’t be able to see Scarlett’s Slack profile for the password, but employees at Apple can access it.

“I was looking at levels.fyi (a website that lets people compare salary data across companies) and noticed a few very low salaries in a certain geographic area that were 10 to 15 percent lower compared to other people on the team. Every time I looked at gender, they were women. I’m not going to say that’s a definitive issue, but it’s a prompt for anyone to ask if this is a widespread problem. We should be able to easily find out whether or not that’s the case so we can know whether people are truly being paid fairly.”

– Cher Scarlett, Apple Employee

So far, her survey stopped just shy of 2,000 signatures. She believes Apple’s intimidation, by shutting down other surveys, is why they didn’t get to their projected 2,500 number. Still, 2,000 employees should be enough for a look into Apple’s pay practices, especially with the information it’s collecting. The survey asks about salary, team and level within that team, as well as tenure, whether or not they got a signing bonus and how much it is, location and whether or not they’re permanently remote, latest restricted stock units grant, as well as race and gender.

So far, Apple hasn’t told the employees they have to shut the survey down.

Legal Options

“Apple cannot bar its employees from discussing pay equity as it relates to protected classes. If they were, they could tell people not to talk about pronouns. The logical outgrowth of that doesn’t even track. I view their effort to shut this down as an act of retaliation.”

– Vincent P. White, labor lawyer with White, Hilferty & Albanese

The Verge spoke to a few legal professionals, who agreed that, by shutting down the first surveys, Apple may have broken the law. All of the information provided was voluntary, and employees can legally share salary information. In fact, preventing employees from discussing their salaries is illegal. Furthermore, by gathering information from willing participants, surveys could be considered a form of labor organizing, which is also protected under U.S. law.

By shutting these surveys down, Apple called attention to a potentially large problem at Apple. They may have also violated their employees’ rights, opening them up to a lawsuit.

Apple’s Dire Diversity Status

Chart plotting male and female employees at Apple. The gap has closed by only a few percentage points over the past 6 years, going from 20% female to 24% female

Apple hasn’t shrunk their gender gap much. They also only report two gender identities.

 

Apple publishes their inclusion and diversity stats on their website. The stats go back to 2014. Over the past 6 years, there has been little change. Women still make up less than a quarter of the tech workforce, 24%, up from only 20% in 2014. Across every category, even nontech and leadership, men outnumber women by wide margins, especially in tech and leadership.

Apple's technical workforce by race, described below

Race doesn’t paint a better picture at Apple either. Only 4% of Apple’s leadership is Black, with 59% being white. In Apple’s tech organization, there’s actually a smaller number of Black employees in 2020 than there was in 2016. 8% of Apple’s tech employees were Black in 2016, then 7% in 2017, and now 6% in 2020. Indigenous employees are at 1%, consistently, and Hispanic/latinx (as Apple reports it) are at 8%, the same as 2015. Asian employees have been better represented at Apple, with Asian employees making up 39% of technical employees at Apple, up from 23% in 2014. The workforce across the board, in tech, nontech, leadership, retail, and retail leadership is all mostly white. Retail leadership presents the most dramatic difference, with 70% of Apple’s retail managers being white.

It’s likely Apple doesn’t want anyone breaking these numbers down further, finding out more about how employees are paid, how frequently they get promotions, their current level compared to their experience, if they got signing bonuses, or other potential disparities.

Apple’s Path Forward

Apple may have a potential lawsuit on their hands, but the real problem, for Apple, lies in the data they tried to suppress. Apple hasn’t been hiring or retaining many women or racial minorities. They’re not promoting them either. Apple claims they don’t have wage discrepancies among levels, but do they? Do they perhaps not have wage discrepancies because they don’t promote women and non-white employees enough, therefore can claim that everyone at the same level makes the same amount? It’s hard to say, and Apple certainly tried their best to stop employees from finding out.

Apple has the same path forward as any other tech company. They need to draw from a more diverse pool of candidates through events focused on women in tech and minority groups in tech. They need to foster internal discussions, not stifle them. Perhaps, most importantly, they need to provide education and reminders to employees. Any employee doing interviewing should have diversity training that points out the unconscious bias that often holds back women, racial and religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ people. They need to be reminded of it every time they go to do an interview and fill out an evaluation.

Nearly every single tech company has this problem, and very few are taking the initiative to make things better. The actual effort required to make improvements at a company are incredibly low, and yet companies simply aren’t making the investment. They feel as though they only need to seem progressive, not actually make any progress.

Apple claims that they’ve closed the wage gap at Apple. That, in 2020, women made 99.6¢ for every dollar a man made, while underrepresented minorities made 99.7¢ for every dollar a white employee made. They claimed to fix that in 2020, a full 1:1. However, their reluctance to allow employees to check those figures, showing a complete lack of transparency, leads many Apple employees and critics to—quite reasonably—assume the worst. What is Apple hiding?

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