All in one week Apple has hired and fired Antonio Garcia Martinez, who would’ve been a member of its App Store and Apple News Advertising team, after receiving swift backlash from employees.
After the announcement of Garcia Martinez’s hiring on Monday over 2,000 employees signed a petition by Wednesday calling for his removal after they learned of offensive and sexist views expressed in a book he had authored, called Chaos Monkeys.
In the petition seen by The Verge, concerned employees wrote, “His misogynistic statements in his autobiography — such as ‘Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit’ — directly oppose Apple’s commitment to Inclusion & Diversity.”
The company responded by stating, “At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted. Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.”
Garcia Martinez worked at Facebook from 2011 to 2013, where he was a Product Manager on the social media giant’s ad targeting team. He then left to pursue his own projects including writing his now infamous book, which was published by HarperCollins in 2016.
It’s not clear if Apple knew about the book prior to his hiring but employees rightly wrote that it "calls into question parts of our system of inclusion at Apple, including hiring panels, background checks, and our process to ensure our existing culture of inclusion is strong enough to withstand individuals who don't share our inclusive values."
Apple has been open about its efforts to improve its hiring practices to promote diversity and inclusion, even going as far as publishing a yearly report on its progress. The company still has a lot of work to do (59% of its leadership identify as white and 69% identify as male) and will now have another stumbling block to examine in its hiring process.
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