Women take centre stage at Apple conference as company push diversity

It wasn’t the ground breaking new technology that was making the headlines at Apples annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), it was the women presenting them.

Jennifer Bailey, Vice President of Internet services, and Susan Prescott, Vice President of Product Marketing, took to the stage on Monday to showcase Apple’s recent developments in an effort to showcase the company’s new stance on diversity.

The move came after recent statistics revealed that just 30% of its 98,000 employees, and a meagre 20% of Apple’s renowned engineers, are women. The report also highlighted the discrepancies in ethnicity, with 55% of workers being white.

The move to empower female executives to partake in the limelight is a huge step for the technology giant, having had just three women make an appearance at the WWDC since 2007, two of which were third party developers and the other was supermodel Christy Turlington.