The Cost of Being an ‘Interchangeable Asian’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The traits that are optimal or believed to be optimal for a midlevel role are intelligence, conscientiousness, and ability to fit in.
The traits that are optimal or believed to be optimal for leadership roles are the ability and willingness to play aggressively and intuitive or deep understanding of the behavior of other people.
Rather than this weird, face-blindness theory I would recommend taking a look at the intersection of culture, presentation, and stereotypes.
The article is frankly deceptive. The US is 4.9% Asian and 63.7% white. The study [1] found that executives in the tech companies examined are 13.9% Asian and 80.3% white. So Asians are 2.25-times as likely to reach an executive position compared to whites. But by comparing against their over-represented numbers among tech workers, the article spins this as discrimination. Look how they phrased it:
Another study, from 2013, found that while there were nearly as many Asian professionals as white professionals working at five big tech companies [..], white men and women were 154 percent more likely to be an executive than their Asian counterparts;
There were "nearly as many Asians as whites" in a company, but there are 13-times as many whites as Asians in the US! This is presented as a completely neutral, non-problematic fact, and that this over-representation doesn't reach even further is what was cast as the problem.
[1] https://www.ascendleadershipfoundation.org/research/hidden-i...
How much of a contribution are these things really? If testing games is your job, how is this a contribution beyond what you're already getting paid for? There's a limit to how much of a contribution 1 test engineer can make. As for the diversity committee, what results did the committee achieve to make things objectively better for company and workers?
Also, the first sentence and photo caption refer to Lau as game developer but her LinkedIn bio doesnt mention game dev.
It seems the article is elevating her position to make a harder hitting piece which is ingenuous.
Is this disproportionate to the relative share of employees of each racial group?
Google is 52% white and 42% Asian. [1] Presumably Asian people are less likely to mix up other Asians, and the vast majority of the non-Asian employee base is white. So it makes sense that most of the "name bunglers" are white. They make up 90% of the non-Asian employees in companies like Google.
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/311810/google-employee-e...