Apple: Still Pretty White and Male, But Slowly Improving

Sixty-eight percent of Apple's worldwide workforce is male and 56 percent of them are white, although Cupertino is slowly becoming more diverse, according to the company's latest report.

Women and people who Apple considers to be underrepresented minorities in the US made up 37 percent and 27 percent of new hires, according the the report. Both categories are 5 percent higher than Apple's overall employee makeup, and are also 6 percent higher than they were in 2014.

Apple says 54 percent of new hires in the US are now minorities. Asians make up the largest group at 24 percent, followed by blacks and Hispanics at 13 percent each. Whites, meanwhile, make up 46 percent of new hires.

Apple releases its diversity report each summer. It celebrated the diversity advances it reported this year as a key step in helping to "break down historical barriers in tech."

Those barriers, which include not only underrepresentation of minorities but also unequal pay that favors men, are well-known to Apple and its competitors. Intel last year announced it would spend $300 million to attract more women and minorities for engineering and computer science positions.

Facebook also wants to close the tech diversity gap, and one of its many initiatives is TechPrep, a website in English and Spanish that offers underrepresented groups information about computer science and resources to help them get started in the industry.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has admitted in the past that he is not satisfied with the diversity of the company's employees. In a note accompanying 2014's diversity report, Cook said that the stats showing a majority white, male workforce are "not new to us, and we've been working hard for quite some time to improve them."

It appears that those efforts are gaining ever-so-slight momentum; the percentage of employees who are male has been decreasing 1 percent per year for the past three years.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.