Apple keeps shutting down employee pay surveys but that isn't stopping them

What you need to know

• Apple has forced employees to shut down two surveys into pay.
• A third attempt is underway, and there's little Apple can do to stop it.

Why doesn't it want people to share how much they are paid?

Apple has reportedly killed two employee surveys into how much they are being paid, but that isn't stopping a third from running outside of its control. According to a new report, more than 500 respondents have already offered up their data for the new survey — and there's little Apple can do about it.

Apple employee Cher Scarlett is the driving force behind the new survey, setting it up on Typeform to avoid any potential Apple involvement.

Two pay transparency surveys have been shut down in the past 6 months at Apple. I won't be intimidated. We have the right to collect this data amongst ourselves.

There's a new survey, voluntary and totally anonymous.

The password is my status in Slack.https://t.co/fUr1DZ5Df1

— Cher Scarlett (@cherthedev) August 7, 2021

Previous attempts to run such surveys have been thwarted by Apple, initially because it was concerned about the personally identifiable information that was being collected. The second was killed because it used Apple's corporate Box account, something the company wasn't keen on.

The first known survey began in the spring and asked people to volunteer salary information in addition to how they identify in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, and disability. After about 100 responses, Apple's people team — the company's name for what is commonly called human resources — asked employees to take the survey down, saying the demographic questions constituted personally identifying information, or PII.

Now, Scarlett's third attempt is avoiding any potential Apple action by using a personally-funded Typeform account to handle the survey.

"I was looking at levels.fyi (a website that lets people compare salary data across companies) and noticed a few very low salaries in a certain geographic area that were 10 to 15 percent lower compared to other people on the team," Scarlett says. "Every time I looked at gender, they were women. I'm not going to say that's a definitive issue, but it's a prompt for anyone to ask if this is a widespread problem. We should be able to easily find out whether or not that's the case so we can know whether people are truly being paid fairly."

And that's the crux of the matter. Scarlett and other Apple employees want to make sure that no minority is being penalized, something that's a problem at most businesses across the world. It isn't clear whether Apple is shutting these surveys down to protect itself from people asking for more money as a result of learning how much colleagues are earning, but as Scarlett points out, its actions do nothing more than make people more suspicious.

The Verge even suggests that Apple's actions could be illegal, although that's a matter for the lawyers. For now, we await the results of Scarlett's new survey with bated breath. It's a distraction Apple could very much do without as it nears iPhone 13 time.

Apple is set to announce the best iPhone yet in or around September, with new Apple Watch, iPad, Mac, and AirPods announcements also thought to be in the works.