Apple CEO says gender diversity essential to US tech sector
Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that the US will lose its prime position in the field of technology unless gender diversity in the sector improves. In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Cook also expressed his support for job development in the US and his commitment to carbon reduction.
We’ve already created 1.5 million jobs in the U.S. among app developers. This is the largest-growing job segment in the United States. If you think about it, it essentially didn’t exist prior to 2008.

When you look at where app developers are coming from, there are some demographic groups that aren’t represented that well. So a couple of weeks or so ago we launched a free Swift app development curriculum. We had partnerships immediately with several community colleges to begin teaching that in the fall to people in places where app development hasn’t taken hold—in Alabama, Houston, Texas, Ohio. They are kind of all over.

And we firmly believe that for any kid in public or private school, coding should be required. And not just for one year. It should just be like your language class and other classes where you take a more advanced class every year and go up the ladder. Whether you are going to work in retail or health care or in hospitality or in technology or manufacturing or finance, it would be really helpful to know how to code.

It would be good for Apple if more people were coding apps for your phones, but you have recently taken some positions that are less clearly tied to making a profit by making things for people to buy. For example, pledging to remain committed to the Paris accord on the reduction of greenhouse gases after President Trump decided the U.S. will leave it. Why do that?

My simple view is that people should have values, and because companies or organizations are nothing more than a collection of people, by extension, companies should have values. Those values are integral to making decisions on a daily basis, the thousands of things that come your way. We have a responsibility to create jobs in the communities we are in. We are an American company and we deeply love America, and I do feel we have an obligation to create jobs in America. In addition to that, we feel it’s a responsibility not only of American companies but companies everywhere to reduce their carbon footprint. Our commitment, which we set several years ago, is to run Apple on 100 percent renewable energy. We are proud now that we’ve made it to 96 percent worldwide. We are at 100 in the United States and 100 in China, our two largest markets. We’ve now gone beyond our company into partners that we work with, driving people who manufacture on our behalf to run their operations with 100 percent renewable energy … We are putting a huge two-gigawatt solar facility in China, and they’ve been incredibly receptive to it. We feel that one of the things that has increased the receptivity was the Paris agreement. They’ve decided they are going to make a significant reduction in carbon. We felt that it was really important to stay in that agreement because we see that a lot of countries out there are changing their behavior because of the agreement.

You’re also opposed to the president’s travel ban. You frame that as a human rights issue as much as a labor and talent supply issue, but Silicon Valley does employ a lot of immigrants and international employees.

The original travel ban hit, and we had cases where a spouse was in the U.S., our employee was traveling outside the U.S., and our employee couldn’t get back into the country. This is not who we are as people. We don’t break families up. That’s not America. It wasn’t about, for us, the [talent] access kind of question I know everyone is sort of fixated on. It’s about treating people with dignity and respect. We had cases where grandparents trying to come into the country to participate in the birth of their first grandchild couldn’t get in the country. I don’t mean people that had not been vetted and gone through the process. Security is very important, but there’s a way to do things.

Let’s take on another serious issue. Silicon Valley has a dismal record employing women.

Technology has an enormous issue with gender diversity. The studies show that because coding isn’t introduced [correctly], it gets labeled somewhere along the line from a societal point of view as a “boy” thing. You wind up with less and less women going into coding, and then it’s no surprise that when you try to recruit as a company for people coming out of college, guess what? Unfortunately, the percentages are what they are. That doesn’t mean companies aren’t making mistakes. There’s lot of things that have got to change, but fundamentally the fix to this will be focusing on the total population [with early education]. We can do it, and frankly it’s a must. Technology is not going to stay in the lead in the United States unless gender diversity gets materially better, it’s just not. Because the fundamental skill will not be in the U.S. to lead. Just on a population basis.