Apple's employee diversity improved in 2015 - but only just

Apple released its diversity report - effectively an overview of who Apple employs and where - over the weekend and the results are much the same as 2014.

In 2015, Apple employed 72,494 people, up from 59,869 in 2014, with jobs ranging from executive to craft workers to technicians.

Of its employees, around 30% are women, up from 29% in the previous report. 8.6% of the workforce are black, up from 8%, and 11.7% are Hispanic or Latino, up from 11.5%.

Apple's executives - who recently rejected a motion to hire non-white males, managers - and senior figures are almost entirely male (83%) and white (83%).

Apple CEO Tim Cook has addressed the issue of diversity, writing a letter, published on Apple.com, that talked about the company's hiring process.

"Diversity is critical to innovation and it is essential to Apple's future," he wrote. "We aspire to do more than just make our company as diverse as the talent available to hire. We must address the broad underlying challenges, offer new opportunities, and create a future generation of employees as diverse as the world around us."

The filing, known as an EEO-1 report, is not a perfect measure of how diverse a company's work force is - and Apple has been found to be better than its peers in some areas - but the company is clearly not fulfilling Tim Cook's commitment to "address the broad underlying challenges" or "offer new opportunities" to non-white people.

Microsoft's work force is currently made up of 26.8% woman, according to the company. Google is level with Apple, with 30% of the workforce being made up of women. Around 32% of Facebook employees are woman, the company said, putting it slightly ahead of the rest.