An informal employee survey shows a 6% wage gap between men and women at Apple

Apple Park photo of the side of the main building (Image credit: Apple)

What you need to know

Apple employees recently put together their own survey about pay equity.
2000 Apple employees filled out the survey.
It revealed a 6% pay gap between men and women for those who took the survey.

An informal employee survey is bringing up the discussion of pay inequity at Apple.

As reported by The Verge, a group of Apple employees put together an informal survey to gather data around pay equity. After comparing the data provided by about 2,000 employees, the survey found a 6% wage gap between men and women in the company.

Cher Scarlett, a software engineer at the company who worked on the survey, says that employees are feeling the need to revisit the issue. While Apple said it had addressed pay gaps in the past, their own data is saying otherwise.

"We know 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 what Apple will do to prevent it from happening year-over-year," Scarlett says.

More than anything, employees would like the company to be more transparent with pay.

Scarlett knows the survey isn't conclusive. "We're not trying to draw definitive conclusions, we're trying to get some insight because we've had none," she explains. "What we actually want is for Apple to do a third-party investigation into salary data, or an audit that we have insight into."

When reached for comment, Apple spokesperson Rachel Tulley provided the standard response about pay equity at the company.

"Apple has a firm and long‑standing commitment to pay equity. Globally, employees of all genders earn the same when engaging in similar work with comparable experience and performance. In the United States, the same is true for employees of all races and ethnicities. We don't ask for salary history during the recruiting process. Our recruiters base offers on Apple employees in similar roles. And every year, we examine the compensation employees receive and ensure that we maintain pay equity."

Earlier this month, Apple had shut down an internal survey about pay that was created by the same group, saying that the survey contained personally identifiable information and that they could not use the internal Box account of the company.

Joe Wituschek is a Contributor at iMore. With over ten years in the technology industry, one of them being at Apple, Joe now covers the company for the website. In addition to covering breaking news, Joe also writes editorials and reviews for a range of products. He fell in love with Apple products when he got an iPod nano for Christmas almost twenty years ago. Despite being considered a "heavy" user, he has always preferred the consumer-focused products like the MacBook Air, iPad mini, and iPhone 13 mini. He will fight to the death to keep a mini iPhone in the lineup. In his free time, Joe enjoys video games, movies, photography, running, and basically everything outdoors.

2 Comments

This is meaningless and needs a lot more nuance. First 2,000 employees is a very tiny fraction of the employees. 6% is not much and can easily be explained by the men who took the may have more seniority and more raises than the women or men may have been higher up and in the company and naturally have a higher pay scale. It was irresponsible to post this story without facts and very limited information.
I certainly support equal pay for equal work. I think it is very difficult in the sort of things people do at Apple, or any number of other companies, to determine what is equivalent work? In manufacturing, when you have a man and a woman putting on the wheel and torqueing down the lug nuts, it is simpler. Just because two coders are in the same section, doesn't man what they do is equivalent. Across the company, it becomes even harder. That's not even across gender, but across individuals.