Apple CEO Tim Cook slams tech companies for not hiring enough women, says he is fixing it in Apple

Apple CEO Tim Cook has slammed tech companies like Apple, Google, Facebook -- in general the entire Silicon Valley -- for not hiring enough women. Currently, reports estimate that women employees make up for just 27 per cent of the total workforce in tech companies. Slamming the poor gender imbalance, the Apple CEO argues that there are "no good excuses" justifying relatively fewer women in the tech sector.

In a conversation with BBC, Tim Cook said that the tech world needed more women to achieve greater heights. Cook even called out his own firm Apple, saying that there was still "not enough women at the table" in the tech sector.

Apple CEO criticized poor gender diversity in the tech sector. He said that companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and others "will not achieve nearly what (they) could achieve" without a more diverse workforce.

According to statistics shared by Exploding Topics, a website that monitors trends, women hold just 26.7 per cent of tech-related jobs in the US. In fact, the number has seen a slide in the last one year. The total number of women in tech-related positions decreased by 2.1 per cent from 2020 to 2021. In a count of 552,751 tech employees across 56 companies, only 141,038 employees were women, noted the website.

While Cook criticised the tech sector, he also highlighted how his own company was trying to change things for better. He revealed that Apple has introduced its App Store Foundation Program to the UK for the first time and that it was giving preference to women developers for it.

Cook said that Apple is also hiring more women. In 2021 in Apple, women employees made up about 35 per cent of its total staff.

Cook highlighted that the impact of technology on people and world will be better if more women were part of the industry. "Technology is 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 said.

A recent data by Deloitte Global predicts that large global technology companies, on average, will reach nearly 33 per cent overall female representation in their workforces in 2022, up slightly more than 2 percentage points from 2019.