The late co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, had a vision for the company’s new flagship campus and they spared no expense replicating it. The attention to detail is so great that they created a two-story-high yoga room complete with walls made of rocks imported from Kansas to look like the stones at Jobs’ favorite hotel.
The finished project is well on its way to being a headquarters of mammoth proportions—it costs $5 billion, after all—but the design decisions remind us of a common problem in tech (and corporate America overall). Despite boasting architectural details like four-story-high glass doors and a 100,000-square-foot fitness center, the 175-acre campus has no childcare center, according to Wired who got an exclusive first look at the headquarters (emphasis mine).
[T]he layout of the Ring is too rigid, and that unlike Google’s planned Mountain View headquarters (which that company has described as having “lightweight blocklike structures, which can be moved around easily as we invest in new product areas”), Apple Park is not prepared to adapt to potential changes in how, where, and why people work. That there is no childcare center.“It’s an obsolete model that doesn’t address the work conditions of the future,” says Louise Mozingo, an urban design professor at UC Berkeley.
So not only is there no childcare center, the campus was created in a way that’d make it hard to rectify this omission.
It may be easy to dismiss the absence of childcare at Apple’s headquarters. If they are working there, it is likely that they are making more than enough money to pay for high childcare costs—or perhaps they have a partner who is able to lead on the childcare front. However, it’s still important to note that even in 2017, Silicon Valley (and corporate America at large) is still woefully behind in promoting both work-life balance and gender equity. Quartz notes:
On-site childcare remains a rare feature in corporate America. But it’s been shown to do wonders for parents of young children. Its presence has helped Patagonia, for example, to retain 100% of the women on staff who have had children over the past five years. (The average in the US is under 80%.)
Apple’s workforce is overwhelmingly male—and this move definitely would not help. A Reuters article on Apple’s latest diversity numbers shows they have a long way to go:
Apple’s global workforce was 32% women, up one point from the end of June 2015. Women held 23% of technical positions, up one point from a year ago, and 28% of leadership positions, unchanged from June last year.
But with almost all of Apple’s shareholders voting against proposals to improve employee diversity within the corporation for two years in a row, it isn’t surprising that this happened. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple will see the error of their ways and if they do—will they pay the same amount of attention to detail to improving diversity as they did to the new HQ’s design?