Aren't there sufficiently talented women -- and also people of Hispanic and Asian ancestry -- who could serve as leaders and role models at Apple?
They also had some of the same set on stage the prior year.
Improving diversity requires changes in hiring, promotion and culture. It will take time for the number of employees who are part of underrepresented minorities to rise and for them to rise in rank until they eventually become part of the generation that replaces the generation that currently fills the executive team.
I'm a feminist, I like Apple and I want it to become a more diverse company because I think that's good for society and I think it would allow Apple to make better products and push the industry even more to innovate. I do think Apple is trying, I don't think they're doing quite as well as they could. It's perfectly fine and necessary to criticize, to push them but there is no magic button that Tim Cook can push and make everything instantly better. No matter how much you may want to, stopping decades of discrimination takes time and undoing the damage it caused takes longer still. It sucks and it's not fair but I understand that people are angry about it but it's not fair to blame Tim Cook for it. And quite frankly, if you believe that a gay man from Alabama doesn't care about discrimination and wouldn't push that magic button if it existed, I'm not sure there is anyone capable of satisfying your expectations.
This thing going on where one just looks at %person%, acknowledges that they are (A) old (B) white (c) male or (D) all of the above and basing all value judgments on those variables regardless of other externalities or facts like what their sexual orientation might be and how it could possibly inform endeavors of intersectionality and diversity within a corporation that we simply aren't privy to as consumers BECAUSE of said variables seems to me like flipping the script on discrimination and bias and overcorrecting hard, right into the side of a building, and what's more it seems destructively infantile.