Margaret M. Chin - Stuck: Why Asian Americans Dont Reach the Top

Margaret M. Chin

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chin, Margaret May, 1962 author.

Title: Stuck : why Asian Americans dont reach the top of the corporate ladder / Margaret M. Chin.

Description: New York : New York University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019043223 | ISBN 9781479816811 (cloth) | ISBN 9781479842766 (paperback) | ISBN 9781479873807 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479845682 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Leadership. | Asian AmericansEducation. | Asian AmericansPsychology. | Affirmative action programs.

Classification: LCC HM1263 .C45 2020 | DDC 305.895/073dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043223

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To Perry, Alex, and Meredithwho keep me laughing and grounded

A T a 2013 reception at the New York Harvard Club for newly admitted students, an event at which perhaps half of those attending appeared to be Asian Americans, because they brought their many proud relatives, an admissions officer said to me, only half joking, that since 1980 the college had admitted and graduated thousands of second-generation Asian Americans and added, Where are they? Why arent they at the top? In other words, why werent Asian Americans among the elite professionals in corporate America? Why werent they occupying the so-called C-suites, the traditional province of senior executives?

Harvards admissions team has always believed that the students admitted by the university are the cream of the crop. Based on information in alumni reunion books and other data, Harvard officials knew that virtually all of the universitys second-generation Asian American graduates were employed and were by most standards doing very well professionally. But university officials expected that after about three to four decades, many more of these graduates would have attained leadership jobs in the private, public, nonprofit, and political sectors. Yet data accumulated about these graduates showed that very few of Harvards Asian American graduates had ascended to these levels.

I ask similar questions in this book. What has become of these second-generation Asian Americans? And given their significant academic achievements, why cant more of them be found at the top levels of the business and professional worlds? Is there a so-called bamboo ceiling, an invisible but powerful barrier that halts their progress at a certain point? Perhaps there is, because for this population the problem is not simply earning a college degree or landing an entry-level job but attaining a C-suite job, the C standing for job titles that include the word chief.

In this book I define second-generation Asian Americans as those who were born in the United States or arrived in the country before the age of thirteen, a cohort sometimes known as the 1.5 generation. The two groups that compose this generation are socially indistinguishable from one another because all of them were raised in the United States and thoroughly Americanized by way of the school system. Those born or raised in America represent 40.1 percent of the twenty-five- to sixty-four-year-olds working full-time in the private and nonprofit sectors, according to data collected through the American Community Survey conducted by the US Census Bureau from 2013 to 2017.

Of all Asian Americans between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-four, 40.1 percent are the broadly defined second generation. And second-generation Asian Americans represent an increasing portion of younger age groups. They comprise 58.1 percent of twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds, 41.6 percent of thirty-five- to forty-four-year-olds, 28.7 percent of forty-five- to fifty-four-year-olds, and 19.7 percent of fifty-five- to sixty-four-year-olds.

Their general failure to attain leadership positions is evident even in fields in which Asian Americans are statistically overrepresented, notably technology. Studies of professionals in law and business indicate unexpectedly similar results. Not surprisingly, given these statistics, the so-called bamboo ceiling has in recent years been the focus of the bulk of research on Asian Americans in the workforce.

Industry studies focusing on the fields of not only technology but also finance and law show the same pattern. A Portrait of Asian Americans in the Law, a 2017 report by Eric Chung and his colleagues Samuel Dong, Xiaonan April Hu, Christine Kwon, and Goodwin Liu, published by Yale Law School and the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, showed that despite the fact that Asian Americans have constituted the largest minority group in major law firms for nearly two decades, they have the lowest partner-to-associate ratio among all ethnic groups. At American law firms, about 90 percent of equity partners are white, whereas Asian Americans represent just 11.8 percent of associates and 3 percent of partners.

In technology companies located in the San Francisco Bay Area, Asian Americans, along with other minorities, have had difficulty climbing the management ladder to become executives, despite their noticeable proficiency in technical subjects. Buck Gee, former CEO of Andiamo Systems, and Cisco GM and VP, and Denise Peck, former VP at Cisco Systems and now executive advisor with ASCEND, found that by 2015 despite being outnumbered by Asian men and women in the entry-level professional workforce, white men and women were twice as likely as Asians to become executives and held almost three times the number of executive jobs.

Similar statistics exist for Wall Street. Studies show that in finance Asian Americans make up only 12 percent of professionals and less than 5 percent of executives, wrote Laura Colby for Bloomberg. Even though there are so few in the upper echelons, Asian Americans, including the foreign-born, compose almost 7 percent of the US population, more than 10 percent of the student population on most college campuses, and close to 25 percent of students at most elite college campuses.

***

Like the Harvard admissions officers and these studies, sociologists Richard Alba and Guillermo Yrizar Barbosa from the CUNY Graduate Center, in their 2015 Ethnic and Racial Studies journal article Room at the Top?, written thirty-five years after Harvard began admitting minorities in large numbers, ask the same question: Where are the Asian Americans, especially the second generation? In response, the authors suggest that perhaps it will take more time for this generation to make its mark on the corporate world. They predict that capable Asian Americans and other minorities will move into higher-level jobs when white baby boomers retire. They contend that certain members of minority groups possess the credentials to ascend to these positions, and like many immigration scholars, they predict that as US demographics change, there will be room at the top.