Apple says it has pay equity, but an informal employee survey suggests otherwise

Employees say there is a six percent difference in the pay of men and women who responded to the survey

According to software engineer Cher Scarlett, a preliminary analysis of the unofficial Apple Pay Equity Survey shows a six percent pay gap between the pay of men and women. This is similar to the gender pay gap in San Francisco, which is about five percent, but disappointing for a company that claims that people of all genders "earn the same when they engage in the same work with comparable experience and performance. " "

The results aren't scientific—employees surveyed and only 2,000 responded (out of Apple's estimated 147,000 employees in 2020)—but they point to why some employees doubt the company's claim that it raised his salary. Equity issue has been fixed.

"We know that pay equity was a problem in the past and Apple did something to fix it, but we're having this conversation again because we're seeing gaps in certain areas of the company and we want to know how." How." What Apple will do is to prevent this from happening year after year," Scarlett says.

A small group of Apple employees, including Scarlett and members of the data analysis organization, will present the results to a team of people at Apple this week.

Scarlett also says she found that there were very few women, non-binary and non-white people in senior positions at the company -- or in technical roles, which are usually paid the highest.

"These charts show that white people have more opportunities to advance within the company, and are more likely to work in technical roles than under-represented demographics," she wrote on Twitter.

Scarlett knows that the survey is not conclusive. "We're not trying to draw definitive conclusions, we're trying to get some insight because we don't have any," she explains. "We really want Apple Pay to conduct a third party investigation into the data, or an audit that we have insight into."

The Verge was given access to survey data, which provided evidence of the pay gap between respondents. We analyzed survey data by isolating nearly 1,400 technical roles, then grouping them by job level, gender and race. We then explored the average salary for the job level, as well as the race and gender breakdown within that job level. We went with an average value to smooth out any skewness coming from outliers (which can be easily cropped into user-supplied data). The approach didn't take into account things like college degrees or years of experience. We chose not to look at non-technical respondents, as there were only 520.

Scarlett emphasized the idea that there weren't enough non-technical responses to competency analysis, noting that it can be hard for those employees to find out about the survey the first time around. "It's easy to fall into the idea that the sample size is small so it should be set aside," she says. “But the fact that I don’t work in retail and where I post mostly goes to people in the software organization. So retail and support responses come in organically.”

Among survey respondents in data provided to The Verge, the median pay for men in mid-level technical roles was 6.25 percent higher than the median salary for women, while the median pay for white workers in mid-level technical roles was 5.06 percent. . more than non-white employees. The sample included 944 white men out of a total of 1,408 respondents.

The average number of stock grants (restricted stock units) for non-white workers in entry-level and mid-level technical roles was about 11 percent lower than the average number of RSUs for white workers among survey respondents.

Higher levels of engineering organization show a partial reversal of this trend. The median salary for women in key engineering roles is 1.2 percent higher than the average salary for men among survey respondents – but Scarlett is wary of the results. "Men in those higher roles are less likely to answer surveys because they are paid the most outside of leadership in the company," she says. There were far fewer respondents in this category than in mid-level technical roles.

Scarlett began the survey after Apple shut down previous efforts to collect salary data for employees. "I don't think anyone is saying there's definitely a pay gap, whether it's gender or race or disability," she told The Verge in a previous interview. "But it worries everyone that every time someone tries to create more transparency, Apple shuts it down." The company reportedly told employees that previous surveys contained personally identifiable information.