Apple and Amazon are two noteworthy holdouts among major technology companies refusing to share their EEO-1 diversity data with the media, says USA Today. US businesses submit an annual EEO-1 form to the federal government, detailing the racial, ethnic, and gender lines of their workforces. While resistance to sharing that data has been common for years, in recent months, more and more companies have been bowing to pressure. Facebook, eBay, Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn have made their EEO-1s public; Intel has been disclosing its data for a decade.
USA Today writes that it recently approached some of the holdouts. In response Twitter chose to publish its EEO-1 on Friday, and at its annual shareholder meeting last week, Microsoft stated that it would publish by the end of December. Only Apple and Amazon declined to share data; Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet moreover refused to speak on the reasons for this, and an Amazon spokesman, Ty Rogers, simply hasn’t responded to a request for comment.
In August Apple released an internally-produced diversity report which confirmed views that the company skews overwhelmingly male, and in the US, white. An associated letter from Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed that the company has been “working hard for quite some time” to improve diversity, and that it’s been “making progress.” If so it’s not clear why the company would skip publishing its EEO-1, but USA Today observes that tech companies often complain that the job classifications in the form don’t match up with positions in the industry.
