Why Aren’t There More Asian Americans in Leadership Positions?

Things only kicked off when she said she was going to ban lots of sub reddits.

Most jobs are somewhat standardized. You can essentially follow instructions. Management, for all the donut eating they do, is less standardized and much more shmoozing based. Much harder to do with even a small language barrier. And old-boys-club or not, you'd expect locals to have more alumni and other attachments which could be useful.

Not all things that result in racial differences are racist.

Racist stereotypes don't have to be logical.

>Are we to believe that they are all also all "feminine, un-charismatic, pushovers?"

When is the last time you've seen media depict an Asian male as sexual virile? When is the last time you've seen an Asian male kiss a woman on screen in Western media. For every one instance I can think of 10 depictions of exactly what you described.

I say this not because the media is solely the cause of these perceptions but it is clearly representative of the greater societal attitudes at play here.

Culture in the Americas was particularly afflicted by class becoming associated with race. There was rampant indentured servitude in Korea hundreds of years ago, basically slavery with different formalities. (I've been told that my surname makes it likely my family is descended from such people.) No one really cares about it any more, because we are fairly racially homogeneous. There is something particularly nasty about making an inborn trait a kind of "brand" of class status.

Racism is weirdly and deeply rooted in US culture. A friend of mine started a gay Asian men's group in Seattle in the last century. He then had to start a 2nd one with a by-law limiting attendance to Asians, because the 1st one had become a pick-up scene for middle-aged white men to find a "Rice Queen." My 20's and 30's were punctuated with the occasional weird transgression from older white men. Much of my youth and childhood were punctuated with rare but memorable occasions of racial/ethnic harassment. I went on a date with a fellow musician who was born in Thailand, and in conversation I realized that an uncomfortably large portion of her flirting history consisted of white men doing things like putting their hand on her thigh in public while talking about prostitutes.

There's something about US culture that seems to be enabling for a fairly extreme level of transgression by some small part of the populace towards Asians, which also results in ethnic self-hatred in American born Asians. My current China born girlfriend has a Ph. D. and an MBA, and she thinks the notion that Asian guys are somehow sexually inferior/unattractive/noncompetitive to be bizarre. Yet, I've had multiple discussions on reddit and Hacker News, where commenters promulgated such weird ideas of inherent Asian inferiority!

The reason why I particularly dislike intellectually bankrupt SJW ideology, is precisely because I know that it has a point! There are weird racial attitudes in various subcultures in the US. It is something that is very hard to pin down and discuss, yet needs to be explored. Representing such a thing badly is precisely the best way to ensure it never gets discussed usefully.

Big data is about to take over the world. We'll have deep knowledge of even the most minute differences in outcome differences. Equality-of-outcome doctrine + big data is a recipe for disaster. You think politics are polarized right now? You ain't seen nothing yet.

It's important to measure what's important. If you're trying to lose weight, and measure your weight every morning (outcome), and you see it's stagnating, you'll be discouraged. If you knew that you had lost some fat and gained tons of muscle, you'd be much more encouraged. What you measure ends up controlling you.

Yes, but Asian Americans are just 4.7% of the US population [1]. So even 14% of executives is 3x their expected representation. That's a very high amount of overrepresentation! Just it's smaller than their overrepresentation elsewhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State...

> Height being a "confounding variable" in discrimination against both Asians and women seems like an interesting theory, but it doesn't fit the facts from the article :"This is worse than the glass ceiling effect that’s been identified for women

Oh, definitely I don't think we have anywhere near the data to claim it is 100% of the explanation here - which would mean it could be disproved using the method you used.

All I am saying is that we know height has a major effect on income and leadership position attainment. This is true in business, politics, everywhere basically. So for shorter than average populations, it is plausible it explains part of their lower income or leadership attainment. (Does it explain all of it? No reason to think that.)

And I am saying that this is an often-ignored factor, which shows that we aren't actually looking at this topic objectively. We have cultural blinders.

Examples:

- They found themselves in a position of go-between with folks outside their family at a young age. One person described being the translator for their dad in buying a car at age 10.

- They had an intense pressure to succeed. They felt that family was struggling mostly to provide them with the tools for success. One person's mother worked 90 hours a week in traditional immigrant gigs at a laundromat (pressing shirts overnight) and restaurant.

- Simultaneously, the older generation of grandparents and family abroad saw them as decadent americans. People outside the family saw them as foreigners -- they would be asked in the street if they spoke english or knew about America. Many described rebuke for their clothing, differences in education, etc. A few talked about over-compensating and trying to be "the ultimate white kid", but not really identifying with that persona.

I walked away from that project with a deep and profound respect for the folks we talked to and the differences in perspective and even thought process. My grandparents were immigrants and talked to me often about their experience... but being an Irish immigrant in 1940s NYC, while a struggle is a very different when you're bridging language and big cultural gaps. My parents, aunts and uncles very clearly identified as Americans, and nobody inside of outside the family questioned that.