Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Last year, a developer named Joe Kukura watched 16 hours of past WWDC keynote footage only to find that Apple has shown two real-life women onstage since 2007. When you consider that the company had 59 featured speakers over that period of time, that’s a straight-up pitiful track record.
On Monday morning, Apple finally did a little rectification. The tech company featured not one but two female Apple employees onstage during this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote speech. They were Jennifer Bailey, a vice president of Apple’s online store and Apple Pay, and Susan Prescott, vice president of product management and marketing. Both of them have been at the company since 2003, according to their LinkedIn pages, meaning that both have long contributed to the success and failures of Apple products. Now is online
The two were professional and entertaining, just as comfortable on stage as any of the old-dudes’ guard that has come to dominate Apple’s highly publicized events. It was an important moment for any young woman with ambitions to go into tech. It was an important step in the tech sector’s diversity saga, but hopefully only the beginning of a what needs to be a much more inclusive industry.
As we’ve noted in the past, there’s nothing like a tech conference to remind the world that men are much more heavily represented in the industry than women. In response, major companies like Samsung and Microsoft have recently taken note of this disparity, putting women onstage alongside their male counterparts at major product launches.
Apple, meanwhile, had continued to lag: Even when the company used its Watch event in March to invite a woman onstage, the gesture backfired, because that woman was not a female Apple employee but international supermodel Christy Turlington. It was the worst possible way for the company to address the very apparent gender disparity onstage, inviting someone who is photographed for a living to celebrate the launch of the Watch over people like Prescott or Bailey, who have spent years dedicating their time in that very company to improve and develop its products.
