Apple has just completed another Worldwide Developers Conference. Only this year, there was a twist.
Unless you count Siri, the iPhone’s female-voiced personal assistant, Monday’s event marked the first time a female Apple executive has taken to the keynote stage.
The Developer’s Conference is where Apple announces major product and services enhancements: things that we never thought we needed until we’re told we need them. This year’s event saw the launch of an Apple music streaming service, a new media app called News, and better battery life to arrive with IOS 9, it’s latest mobile operating system.
The event has been running since 1976 and has a very long history. Still, not once since that time has a female Apple executive taken the stage to offer a demonstration. In 2009, a woman did appear alongside her male business partner to briefly offer a look at their gaming app StarDefense. It was a rare double act, usually men appear solo (57 of them since 2007, according to 2014 research).
But finally, in 2015, it was a woman’s turn. And not just one, TWO women took demonstration honours including Apple VP of product marketing Susan Prescott and the head of Apple Pay Jennifer Bailey.
The first 40 minutes of the event stuck to the usual agenda. One white man (CEO Tim Cook) followed by another (executive Craig Federighi) and then another (Epic Games’ Billy Bramer).
Then it was Jennifer Bailey’s turn, who joined Apple in 2003 and took over Apple Pay in 2014, and took the audience through a number of partnerships, country launches and improvements to the service. She was followed by Susan Prescott, who launched and demonstrated Apple’s new news-reading app called News. She’s another female executive who started with the company in 2003.
This is a major first for Apple, but it’s one that has been a very, very long time coming. The move was significant in acknowledging a good portion of its customer base are women (in certain regions, women are found to be more than twice as like as men to own an iPhone) and that women must be a part of its innovation, development, marketing and sales initiatives going forward.
Women must also be seen. It’s not good enough to put up an all-male line-up of speakers at an event that aims to discuss and get audience members excited about the future. No matter how male-domianted the industry or area, women must take centre stage.
And it seems many of the large tech players are finally catching on.
In May, Google’s I/O developers conference featured three women during the keynote presentation, the first time a woman had appeared since 2011. In late April, Microsoft also featured three women during its annual developer conference. In the last couple of years, major tech companies have moved to publicly acknowledge they have a problem with diversity, publishing updated information on the gender and ethnicity breakdowns of they employee bases. Thirty per cent of Apple’s 98,000 employees are female, including 20% of its tech base and 28% of its leadership. They’re not bad figures compared to the rest of the industry, it’s slightly ahead of Google on leadership — where 22% of leadership positions are held by women, and Microsoft where 17.5% of leadership positions are held by women.
Interestingly, it’s also taken until 2015 for Apple to announce a period tracker for Apple, to come with its next iOS9 operating system update. It’s been a bit of an oversight since 2014, when the company announced how it was going to help user track “key health metrics” including blood pressure and calories, but failed to include anything on menstrual cycles.
Well done to Apple for putting women on stage and CEO Tim Cook who told Mashable over the weekend that we can all expect to “see a change tomorrow”. Let’s hope to see more change in the future.