Tim Cook: 'No good excuse' for lack of women in tech

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Tim Cook said there are not enough women at the table at his company.

Technology will not achieve nearly what it could achieve without a more diverse workforce according to Mr Cook.

There were no good excuses for the lack of women in the industry.

The concept of the Metaverse and augmented reality were found to be profound.

He predicts that in the future people will wonder how we lived without him. We're going to invest a ton in that space.

A very simple example of augmented reality is to use a phone to insert virtual furniture into your house, to see how it would look in your house.

The metaverse is the concept of entire virtual worlds and big tech is investing a lot in it.

Tim Cook visited the UK for the first time since the Pandemic.

The boss of the world's richest company is personable and well mannered.

He was wearing his trademark dark clothes. We joked about the British weather and he offered his sympathies on the death of the queen.

Mr Cook told me that he's not a great role model for work-life balance because he doesn't associate it with himself.

He says that there is little distinction between personal and work. I know they're there, but I don't pay much attention to it.

He was fascinated by my recorder and used it a few times after our interview.

I confessed that I had to ask his colleagues if I could borrow wired headphones to plug into it, as Apple largely abandoned the headphone sockets from its phones in favor of wireless in- ear headphones.

He said that they still sell them. The people still buy them.

He was interested in talking to me about diversity.

In the UK, Apple has launched a programme for female entrepreneurs.

Mr Cook believes that the effect of technology depends on women being at the table.

Unless you have diverse views at the table that are working on it, you don't end up with great solutions.

There were no good excuses for the tech sector not to hire more women.

34% of Apple's US staff were women in 2021, according to the company's figures.

The original Apple Health Kit did not have a period tracker, which led to accusations of male bias among its developers.

Large global technology firms will have 32% female representation in their workforces in 2022, with 25% of them being technical roles, according to a new report.

The lack of girls choosing to pursue science, tech, engineering and mathematics subjects at school is a challenge for the sector.

Mr Cook says businesses can't cop out and say they can't hire enough women because they don't have enough.

The number of people taking computer science needs to be changed.

Everyone should be required to take a coding course by the time they finish school in order to have a working knowledge of how coding works.

Swift, Apple's own programme language, is accompanied by content for learning how to use it.

Three of the female app founders we met have joined Apple's new programme.

After she was shocked by how little her female friends understood about finance, she created a personal finance education app for women.

Some of the groups she belongs to are dominated by men.

There are so many men that are building start-ups that they don't know each other, which is crazy, because the women all know each other on a first name basis.

After her brother died of suicide, Ariana Alexander-Sefre created an app for young people.

She hopes that in five years, there won't be a thing of female founder or a defined niche.

I would love to see the whole field equalized.