“No good excuses” for the lack of women in technology sector: Apple CEO Tim Cook

Cook admitted to the gender imbalance in the workforce at his own firm. According to statistics shared by Exploding Topics, women represent only 27% of the total workforce in tech companies. The total number of women in tech-related positions decreased by 2.1 per cent from 2020 to 2021. As per Statista, the share of female employees at Google was 33.7 percent in 2021. For Apple, the figure was 34.8% in 2021, according to its own diversity report.

During the interview, Tim Cook said that Apple is trying to changes things for better. The Cupertino-based company has recently launched its founders’ development programme for female founders and app creators in the UK. He said that the company is giving preference to women for the programme.

“I think the the essence of technology and its effect on humanity depends upon women being at the table,” Cook said. “Technology’s a great thing that will accomplish many things, but unless you have diverse views at the table that are working on it, you don’t wind up with great solutions”, he added.

One of the challenges that hurdles women participation in the tech industry is the lack of girls choosing to pursue science, tech, engineering and maths subjects at school. “Businesses can’t cop out and say ‘there’s not enough women taking computer science – therefore I can’t hire enough'” said Cook. “We have to fundamentally change the number of people that are taking computer science and programming.”

Cook believes that everybody should be required to take some sort of coding course in order to have a “working knowledge” of how coding works and how apps are created. Apple has created its own programme language, Swift – a powerful and intuitive programming language for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.