Ten people appeared onstage at Apple's WWDC keynote in San Francisco this morning: eight men and two women. Two of the men were people of color, both of them musicians—Drake and Abel Tesfaye of The Weekend, who closed out the event with the live performance of a new song.
That still means that most of the people onstage were white men. But for Apple at least, the relative diversity of its keynoters was a marked improvement. The thing is, as far as anyone can remember, Apple has only put one woman onstage during a keynote in the past several years: Christy Turlington Burns, a model and founder of a nonprofit organization who had used the Apple Watch to train for a marathon.
And so Apple has something to prove. As the conversation around diversity gains traction in Silicon Valley, the most valuable company in the world faces increased pressure from advocates and the larger tech community to show that it is making an effort to be inclusionary. In its first diversity report, released last year, Apple disclosed that 70 percent of employees are men, and 55 percent are white. As it hosts its twenty-sixth incarnation of WWDC, the company had to show it moved the needle, and it did, in a few different ways. But Apple still has a long way to go.
If you watched the keynote closely—as we at WIRED tend to do—you might have noticed a few moments where Apple tried to signal its commitment to greater inclusion. Cook started the event by highlighting that attendees this year came from 70 different countries, emphasizing that 80 percent were here for the first time. He also pointed to attendees from Apple's WWDC Scholarship—a program for middle school, high school and college-age developers culled from organizations that promote diversity in tech.
There were other signs, too. Apple finally added reproductive health features as an update to its HealthKit platform (though we would have liked to hear more details about how it will actually work). And Apple's ritzy Beats 1 ad promotes what the company is calling a radio station for the entire world (though it’s not clear whether it will feature non-Western music).
Most significant, however, was the appearance of two women onstage, both high-ranking officials at the company. Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s longtime e-commerce head and a vice president of hardware engineering at the company, gave an update on Apple Pay (including a sweet new way to use the contactless system to pay for your commute on the bus or tube if you happen to live in London). Susan Prescott, a vice president of application product management, showed off the new News app, Apple’s snazzy answer to Flipboard. Both women were brand new faces at the keynote, appearing alongside more familiar Apple incumbents, including senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi; senior vice president of internet software and services Eddy Cue; and CEO Tim Cook.
The appearance of both wasn’t altogether unexpected. In a piece published yesterday, Mashable’s Christina Warren noted the lack of women at WWDC keynotes during an interview with Cook. He reportedly smiled and responded: “I totally agree with you. Look tomorrow and tell me what you think.”
Whatever Cook's good intentions, however, it's telling that both women have been working at the Cupertino company for more than a decade. As much as it may have been a mindful choice for Apple to feature them in this year’s keynote, they were also apparently overlooked as possible presenters for the company for many, many years.
Which is not to diminish the choice to highlight the women as company spokespeople now, or imply that this was merely tokenism on Apple’s part. Just considering the decades of experience between the two women shows that Apple has indeed included women in senior management roles for years. Even so, the only other new Apple face onstage at WWDC was a man---Kevin Lynch, vice president of technology and the Apple Watch lead---who only joined the company in 2013, that is, many years after Bailey and Prescott did.
Bailey and Prescott are both extremely qualified executives at Apple, and they clearly deserved their moments in the spotlight, regardless of their gender. It would be wrong to question their credibility or suggest that they were only being featured because they are women. But it will be a triumph when one day, it is simply considered normal for men and women alike to stand in front of an audience and act as the very public faces of a company without any need for discussion of tokenism, or of their status and credibility. But that will only happen when diversity in the tech industry becomes the norm.
