Apple seeks SEC permission to exclude new diversity proposals in senior positions

In yet another attempt to modify the appearance of Apple's executive board, the company received a new external proposal for it to review its diversity, mainly in relation to high positions.

Boston's investment management firm (and shareholder), Zevin Asset Management, made another request in September for Apple to consider “integrating sustainability metrics, including metrics regarding diversity among senior executives, in the CEO's performance measures in the company's compensation incentive plans”, which can negatively impact even the compensations by Tim Cook.

Apple's current leadership framework

The same type of request has already been made twice, precisely involving the executive and shareholder Tony Maldonado, but his proposals received less than 6% of the votes.

According to the guidelines of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the lack of support for votes allows Apple to block any similar new proposal for three years and that is what the company did. The company's vice president of management, Gene Levoff, in a letter sent on October 9, requested SEC permission to exclude such a proposal from the company's next shareholders meeting, as reported by Silicon Beat.

Apple believes that its efforts to improve internal diversity have been sufficient, although Maldonado said in May that it “basically deceived investors”, leading them to believe that everything would be fine in this regard. Some time later, Ma created the position of vice president for inclusion and diversity, and handed it over to the then head of human resources Denise Young Smith.

Perhaps to try to get more votes, in this last proposal, Maldonado, Zevin and other shareholders would have cited studies which say that companies with better numbers in diversity would be more likely to do well financially.

Generally speaking, not specifically in higher positions, Apple's latest figures show that 56% of its current employees are white and 68% are men. Meanwhile, a survey in 2016 showed that, among Ma's 107 most important executives, 73 are white men, while 2 are Latino and the other 2 are black.

Regarding Apple's request to exclude the proposal, the SEC is expected to disclose its decision before the general meeting, which is due to take place in February 2018.

via AppleInsider