Apple employees have begun conducting surveys to determine whether the company’s claims about fair pay are true or false.
The surveys stem in part from Tim Cook telling investors in 2016 that Apple had largely tackled pay inequality within the company. Women at Apple made 99.6 cents for every dollar made by men, and underrepresented minorities earned 99.7 cents for every dollar earned by white workers, Apple said. These numbers likely sounded too good for some people to be true, and questionnaires have popped up in recent months.
While Apple’s business policy gives workers the right to discuss salaries and other labor issues, the two previous surveys conducted by the company’s workers were cancelled after Apple’s “people team” ruled them out.
This is because the first survey violated the company’s policies on race, gender, ethnicity and disability, which constitute personally identifying information, and the second because it was hosted on the corporate Box account.
The latest poll, which Apple engineer Cher Scarlett has championed, allows Apple employees to conduct the survey through their TypeForm account, and it seems to have the approval of everyone.
Scarlett explained the study and its objectives: “I was looking at levels.fyi (a website that lets people compare salary data across companies) and noticed a few very low salaries in a certain geographic area that were 10 to 15% lower compared to other people on the team. Every time I looked at gender, they were women. I’m not going to say that’s a definitive issue, but it’s prompt for anyone to ask if this is a widespread problem. We should be able to easily find out whether or not that’s the case so we can know whether people are truly being paid fairly.”
For more information, read the original story in Arstechnica.