Monday Blog
According to a study conducted by Ascend Foundation (a group focused on Asian business issues) and released last week, major technology companies are much more likely to employ Asians as computer programmers than executives. Ascend studied employment records of Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, LinkedIn and Yahoo from 2013. Caucasians held 62 percent of professional jobs at the companies studied, but held 80 percent of executive jobs. By contrast, Asians held 27 percent of professional jobs but only 14 percent were in executive positions. The greatest disparity was between Caucasian males and Asian women. For every 87 professional jobs held by Caucasian men, 1 was an executive job. Only 1 out of every 285 professional jobs held by Asian women was an executive-level job. The report concluded that cultural differences may be one reason for the disparity. Janet Wong, a co-author of the report, said her Chinese-American upbringing taught her “studying hard, getting good grades was all I needed to be successful.” She said she then watched others climb the management ladder while she fell behind. She attributed that to not putting time into building relationships. Co-author Buck Gee said “Asians are perceived as better engineers but poor leaders. Even if you want to be a leader, and show that (you can), there’s implicit bias that you aren’t.” A spokesperson for LinkedIn said they have “work to do in order to create greater diversity at our company.”
Articles from Fast Company, The New York Times, and Santa Cruz Sentinel go into more detail on this topic.
