In my ongoing series of interviews with Asian American scholars that highlight new books and research that examine diverse aspects related to Asian and Asian American experiences, I am very happy to present an interview with my fellow sociologist, Margaret M. Chin, Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, City College of New York.  Margaret’s new book is titled, Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don’t Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder and focusing on U.S.-born and U.S.-raised Asian Americans, it explores how many of them run into the dreaded “glass ceiling” in which they are no longer able to advance and get promoted into higher-level upper management or executive positions throughout various occupations and industries within the corporate world in the U.S.   The book’s description:

In the classroom, Asian Americans, often singled out as so-called “model minorities,” are expected to be top of the class. Often they are, getting straight As and gaining admission to elite colleges and universities. But the corporate world is a different story. As Margaret M. Chin reveals in this important new book, many Asian Americans get stuck on the corporate ladder, never reaching the top. In Stuck, Chin shows that there is a “bamboo ceiling” in the workplace, describing a corporate world where racial and ethnic inequalities prevent upward mobility.

Drawing on interviews with second-generation Asian Americans, she examines why they fail to advance as fast or as high as their colleagues, showing how they lose out on leadership positions, executive roles, and entry to the coveted boardroom suite over the course of their careers. An unfair lack of trust from their coworkers, absence of role models, sponsors and mentors, and for women, sexual harassment and prejudice especially born at the intersection of race and gender are only a few of the factors that hold Asian American professionals back. Ultimately, Chin sheds light on the experiences of Asian Americans in the workplace, providing insight into and a framework of who is and isn’t granted access into the upper echelons of American society, and why.

• Compared to a generation ago, do you think the pressure for young Asian Americans to attain maximum occupational success has eased, stayed the same, or gotten more intense, and why?
  
  I interviewed three cohorts, college graduates from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Among the interviewees all of them spoke about the pressure to attain maximal occupational success. However, members of the youngest cohort see many more pathways to occupational success in the professional realm. More of them admit that they have the option to go out on their own if traditional routes in large corporations are blocked.
  
  
• In your research, what are some specific successful strategies that corporate America has implemented to become more welcoming and inclusive to Asian Americans and other underrepresented workers as they try to make their way into the “C-Suite” supervisory and executive positions?
  
  Some of the more successful corporate strategies have been to recruit from minority training and mentoring programs. Some of the interviewees were recruited, chosen, nominated from their Affirmative Action-type program – like the SEO, Posse and the Emma Bowen Foundation. From the interviewees’ perspective, these programs (even though outside of the corporation) did well in helping to place people of color — including Asian Americans — in jobs. Within the corporations, programs that helped were those that exposed the employee to different divisional areas and / or executives. Mini assignments trained them broadly, and executives were also given a chance to get to know them. Often individuals were promoted as part of a program to expand the pipeline.
  
  However, interviewees did not mention many programs to move people past mid-level. On the other hand, the majority of my interviewees did not feel unwelcome in corporate America. However, they did list incidents where they have been left out of important conversations or meetings, not invited to afterwork get-togethers, and mistaken for other Asian Americans. Individually, they list these as implicit bias incidents or part of the everyday jockeying for positions in corporate America. But as a whole these are common among many of my interviewees moving on up. It seems that corporate America could do more.
  
  
• There seems to be a growing political divide within the Asian American community between younger, U.S.-born Asian Americans who tend to be more progressive and older recently-arrived Asian immigrants (especially from China) who tend to be more conservative. How do you see this dynamic playing itself out within the Asian American community in the near future in terms of their social, political, or even occupational outlook?
  
  My research shows that there are many older U.S.-born Asian Americans who are progressive. They are outnumbered in their age group by the hyper-selected Asian immigrants who tend to be more conservative. Likewise, there are conservative young U.S.-born Asian Americans too. It’s not a generational divide, but more of a class and ethnic divide. Among all the groups, however, they are recognizing that they all face racism. The anti-Asian violence that has struck the community since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has united many conservatives and progressives. While they may still disagree on a solution (whether to find a systemic solution or proclaim that they as individuals are more accomplished and thus does not deserve to be treated this way), at least they are more likely to recognize that they are in the same boat together.
  
  
• As a researcher and an alum of these schools, what are your thoughts about the controversy and debate about whether specialized public schools like New York City’s Stuyvesant High should or should not expand their admissions criteria and move away from strictly relying on standardized tests in order to improve the representation of Black and Latinx students?
  
  I went to Stuyvesant High School, when the school student body was much more racially diverse. I really felt at the time that I learned among peers. As a researcher, the public schools need to address the question of how to make the schools equitable and to provide a learning environment that reflects the humanity around us. In New York City, that means to have a more racially equitable school system. The three specialized high schools that are mandated by the State of NY to use the SHSAT serve less than 6% of the middle school population. Instead of fighting over using the test in these three schools, New York City needs to improve the education for the rest of the population. For the rest of the high schools in New York City, there is no need to rely strictly on a single test. Holistic criteria can be created. New York City can also create more high schools or high school seats in neighborhoods where there is high demand especially in areas with an increasing population of Asian immigrants.
  
  
• Some people have speculated that in the last few years, more young Asian Americans seem to be changing their worldview in terms of the best strategy for long-term success and happiness for themselves and future generations and as such, are recognizing that rather than trying to fit into the mainstream establishment, they should challenge the mainstream establishment and work to fundamentally change it to make it more inclusive and just. What are your thoughts?
  
  I would agree with your assessment. There is much more opportunity for the younger generation to go out on their own. This is true because corporations do not make long term commitments to employees anymore. Since there is a lack of commitment, younger workers are more willing to strike it out on their own. Many of the older workers I interviewed did not feel this way because the cohorts I interviewed are approaching or are way past mid-career and at least before this recession, were not thinking of striking it out on their own. Younger members who had experiences with start-ups felt different.
  
  
• Beyond what you’ve written so far, what was the most interesting finding or memorable moment that you came across in doing your research for this book?
  
  There has to be more research on first-generation college graduates and how they are doing. Among my interviewees, surprisingly, there were very few first generation college students. Their voices are missing from the research on Asian Americans.

In my article on Employment and Occupational Patterns, I described how, despite the fact that many Asian American work in high-status, well-paying jobs, unfortunately many still experience glass ceiling barriers (sometimes referred to as the ‘bamboo ceiling’ for Asian Americans) and other mechanisms of discrimination in the workplace.

To give us a more detailed picture of this issue, a new report by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC, the federal agency in charge of enforcing employment non-discrimination laws) has just released a new study on the extent of workplace discrimination against Asian Americans in federal government jobs (thanks to AngryAsianMan for blogging about this first).

First, a little background data: this report only looked at Asian American workers who work for federal government agencies. According to EEOC data, there are about 2.6 million federal employees and Asian American comprise about 6% of them. That works out to be around 156,000 Asian American federal government workers.

In comparison, there are about 5.2 million Asian Americans in the total civilian labor force. So of all Asian American workers, around 3% work for the federal government. That may not seem to be a lot but in many ways, we might expect the federal government to be more attuned to racial discrimination in their ranks compared to the private sector. So how did Asian American federal workers fare in this regard?

AAPIs have been called the “model minority,” but this community seems to be the “forgotten minority.” This community has been facing a number of misperceptions or stereotypes – for example, AAPIs are quiet, hardworking, family-oriented, technically-oriented, good at math and science, but are also passive, non-confrontational and antisocial.

However, while some of these stereotypes have positive characteristics, they have become the framework of barriers establishing glass or bamboo ceilings which prevent AAPIs from moving into the upper tiers of an organization. In addition, AAPIs face sticky floors which hold AAPIs at a particular level for a prolonged period of time and other obstacles. . . .

[A Gallup survey in 2005 found that] 31% of Asians surveyed reported incidents of discrimination, the largest percentage of any ethnic group. . . . [However, EEOC data] shows that only about 2% of all charges in the private sector and 3.26% in the federal sector are filed by AAPIs. There is more discrimination occurring in the workplace than is being reflected in our charge/complaint statistics.

The report notes that among all federal government agencies, the Broadcasting Board of Governors has the highest Asian American representation at 13.5% while the Tennessee Valley Authority has the lowest at 0.3%. Also significant is that across virtually all federal agencies, compared to their overall representation with a particular agency, Asian Americans are consistently underrepresented as mid-level supervisors and as executives.

Although the report does not provide many specific examples of discrimination against Asian American federal government employees, its summary of the barriers that they face are very similar to the ones I identified in my own article that I cited in the first paragraph: model minority perceptions leading to narrow and limiting assignments, language and accent discrimination, perceptions of foreignness, perceptions of social deficiency, and perceptions of lack of leadership.

Finally, the EEOC’s recommendations are:

• Strong leadership and personal commitment to diversity comes from the top down. Hopefully Barack Obama will fulfill his promise to work toward ending this underrepresentation of Asian Americans in the federal government.
• Strengthen commitment to diversity among agency leadership. This is not just to be politically correct — there is a solid business case to be made that for the U.S. to stay ahead and succeed in the international, globalized economy, its workforce needs to include a broad range of backgrounds, talent, and skills.
• Ensure that supervisor/manager assessments of their Asian American employees are fair, objective, and free from the cultural biases that I listed above.
• Ensure that the EEOC agency itself does its job properly in terms of being accessible to Asian American employees who have a complaint and in properly investigating such complaints. Hopefully this will also be easier to do under our new (Democratic) administration.
• Collaborate with Asian American community organizations and leaders to encourage Asian Americans to work for the federal government and to increase their levels of representation within federal agencies.
• Actively support Asian American employee groups. Rather than promoting “balkanization” as some critics have charged, these ethnically-focused support groups actually lead to greater worker loyalty, productivity, and satisfaction.
• Finally, give Asian American federal employees who do have documented skill deficiencies the opportunities and resources to address them and to improve their skills and qualifications so that they can perform better and be promoted more easily.

As the saying goes, all these things are easier said than done. Nonetheless, I am very confident that Barack Obama’s administration will give closer attention to these kinds of issues within the federal government and that things are looking up for Asian American employees. In other words, there is a new sheriff in town and things are going to change around here.

The Washington Post describes a recent study conducted by the Gallup Organization that measured self-reported incidences of workplace discrimination. Among other things, the report notes that the Asian Americans report the highest rates of discrimination in the workplace:

For example, 31 percent of Asians surveyed reported incidents of discrimination, the largest percentage of any racial or ethnic group, with African Americans the second-largest group at 26 percent. But Asians generally file fewer discrimination complaints than other groups, according to the EEOC. . . .

The Gallup poll found that the most frequent type of discrimination cited by respondents reporting bias (26 percent) was sex bias, followed by race (23 percent) and age (17 percent). Women were more than twice as likely as men to say they had encountered bias. Some types of discrimination reported in the poll are not clearly covered by federal law, including favoritism, sexual orientation and language. . . .

The most frequent reports of discrimination were in promotion decisions (33 percent of those claiming bias) and pay (29 percent). But workers interviewed during the poll also reported bias manifested in harassment, work conditions and assignments.

The article goes on to document several recent lawsuits alleging systematic workplace discrimination, brought against notable companies such as Best Buy, AutoNation, Morgan Stanley, Boeing, Eastman Kodak, BellSouth, and Wal-Mart.

I find it quite interesting that although Asian Americans report the highest levels of workplace discrimination, they tend to be the least likely to actually file a discrimination complaint against their employer. Sadly, it looks like the cultural image of Asian Americans as quiet, docile, and therefore, easy to pick on and discriminate against is apparently true.

It is certainly unacceptable that Asian Americans are apparently encountering so much workplace discrimination. No group deserves to be treated with contempt or hostility in that manner. At the same time, perhaps one of the reasons why Asian Americans experience the most discrimination is because not enough of us actually fight back, which can then encourage even more discrimination against us.

In other words, at some point we as Asian Americans have to stand up, speak out, and demand our rights to equal treatment. No one else is going to do it for us. Until we collectively demonstrate that discriminating against Asian Americans will lead to the same kind of consequences as that committed against Blacks, we will continue to be seen as an easy target, plain and simple.