Apple is throwing its name into the hat of big name tech companies trying to even the male-female ratio within high tech, by sending hundreds of its employees to recruit students attending this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference.
The three-day conference — this year celebrating its twentieth birthday — is dedicated to closing the gender gap that exists in technical jobs in Silicon Valley. It is named after Grace Hopper, a U.S. computer scientist who was one of the first programmers of World War II’s groundbreaking Harvard Mark I computer, and invented the first compiler for a computer programming language.
Other companies attending the conference include Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
The idea is that not only are these tech companies suffering public image problems from not hiring as many women as men, but as the Baby Boomers who kick-started the current tech industry begin to retire, companies that hire predominantly men will suffer a talent gap.
“60% of college graduates in this country are women,” Elizabeth Ames, vice president of marketing for the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, which runs the conference, told Bloomberg. “Companies and boards are realizing that if they don’t learn how to attract and retain talented women they are going to be in a world of hurt.”
Workplace diversity has been a big theme of Tim Cook’s while at the head of Apple. In its first ever diversity report earlier this year, it was revealed that currently 70% of Apple’s global workforce are men.
“Apple is committed to transparency, which is why we are publishing statistics about the race and gender makeup of our company,” Cook wrote in a statement. “Let me say up front: As CEO, I’m not satisfied with the numbers on this page. They’re not new to us, and we’ve been working hard for quite some time to improve them. We are making progress, and we’re committed to being as innovative in advancing diversity as we are in developing our products.”
