As Asian Americans continue to climb the corporate ladders, something continues to prevent them from breaking through to the top.

By Harsh Vathsangam

The bamboo ceiling has made the promotion of APAs to senior managerial roles at top companies a rare occurrence. Art: Margaret To.

Stereotypically Asian Pacific Americans are known to enter careers as meticulous engineers, life-saving doctors, and mad scientists. But how many Asians become CEOs?

Although Asians make up only 5 percent of the U.S. population, according to a study by the Center for Work-Life Policy, they’re highly represented at some of the most prestigious universities, making up between 15 and 25 percent of Ivy League enrollment.

Yet the impressive credentials and achievements that have caused them to be dubbed “the model minority” aren’t reflected in senior leadership positions.

Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics, Inc., recently released a report that stated Asian Americans constitute only 2 percent of board members in Fortune 500 companies, and within these companies there are only nine Asian American CEOs.

The numbers point to a phenomenon known as “The Bamboo Ceiling,” a term that refers to the fact that while Asian Americans find no problem in acquiring prestigious academic degrees, they find it difficult to take the next step up and into senior managerial roles at top companies.

Why can’t Asians break through that bamboo ceiling? It’s certainly not for lack of interest. The CWLP researchers found that 64 percent of Asians compared to 52 percent of their Caucasian counterparts aspire to hold top seats at a company.

Asian family values have stressed hard work, avoiding confrontation, and humble respectfulness. Although these characteristics are positive on their own, these cultural values don’t necessarily match up with success in the cutthroat corporate world.

A popular argument is that these very same characteristics that put Asians on the top of college admissions stacks can work against them when gaining a foothold in corporate America. With these values as the cornerstones of their academic successes, thoughts such as putting one’s ideas forward in meetings, self-promotion, or taking credit for achievements end up being alien concepts.

The result? Often, silence is mistaken for arrogance and unwillingness.

A reason could be lack of mentorship. The CWLP study also found that only 46 percent of Asians say they have a mentor in their professional life compared to more than 60 percent of Caucasians. You can find strategies to help with breaking the bamboo ceiling here.

Another possible cause is that Asian culture places emphasis on eldercare, an activity that could for better or worse take time away from career advancement.

Taking a look at the issue from another perspective reveals more. There are now 61 Chinese and eight Indian companies in the Fortune 500.

With that said, companies with a largely Asian top brass are steadily rising up the rankings and making their presence felt. These numbers are only slated to increase. Conversely, according to Fortune magazine, the number of American companies on this list has been declining from 197 in 2002 to 133 in 2011.

I find myself asking how is it that these companies with Asian CEOs who have the similar cultural values are thriving. But, there is a key difference. It is important to note the distinction between Asians working in Asian companies and Asian Americans working in U.S. companies.

Thus, I argue that it has more to do with the clashing of cultures than any innate inability to perform. Asian Americans need to understand these significant cultural differences and recognize the corporate atmosphere in which they operate if they hope to break through the bamboo ceiling.

Or perhaps we should all book one-way tickets to corporate Asia?

Related Stories —

Science: Breaking through the “bamboo ceiling” for Asian American scientists

NPR: Looking at the ‘bamboo ceiling’

Cornell Chronicle Online: Model minority? A ‘myth of the American dream,’ says panelist at Asian American discussion

Inside Higher Ed: ‘The Myth of the Model Minority’

By Andrea Chin
Art by Andrew Dang

Achieve perfect SAT scores while maintaining a 4.0 GPA. Go to the best college. Enter med school or investment banking or software development. Don’t fail your family.

So many Asian Pacific American students bear the burden of the model minority stereotype as academic advisers and hiring managers make assumptions about the nature and extent of their intellectual abilities and potential for professional advancement. When opportunities for economic and social advancement are progressively dictated by test performance and job security is shakier than ever, competition becomes increasingly cutthroat in a system that mythologizes the virtue of merit to guarantee success.

The system has been designed to enable people designated as intellectually gifted to attend college, traditionally assumed to lead to white collar ¬work and higher tax brackets. As a group, APAs are more likely to have finished postsecondary education than Americans overall. Half of Asian Americans ages 25 and older have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to a quarter of all Americans in this age range, and are twice as likely to have a graduate or professional degree, according to the 2007 American Community Survey.

These numbers, however, mask significant differences among APA groups. Among Asian Indians, 68 percent ages 25 and older has at least a bachelor’s degree.  Another 36 percent has a graduate or professional degree. The same study found that only 15 percent of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders of the same age group, however, have at least bachelor’s degree and just 4 percent have a graduate or professional degree.

Asian immigrants’ self-selection can account for the disproportionate educational attainment rates of the overall APA community. Having more highly educated immigrants settle and start families in the U.S. has raised the general intellectual profile of APAs. The Immigration Act of 1965 brought over a stream of highly educated scientists and technical professionals, mostly from India and East Asia, to meet post-Sputnik America’s labor needs. In the early 1900s, APAs, like Jews, scored much lower on IQ tests than whites whose families had lived in the U.S. longer. Both groups’ overall tests scores improved over time as more highly educated immigrants came to the country.

What about the controversial claim that APAs are inherently smarter than others because of their high IQ scores? Racial differences in test scores are at the core of affirmative action debates, which generally exclude APAs. Some reformers advocate modeling American curriculums on East Asian ones, hoping that “average” Americans can match Asians’ high math and science scores. Unfortunately, as anyone who has taken Psych 100 knows, correlation does not imply causation.

Intelligence is associated with higher test scores, which improve access to elite colleges, which are pipelines for well-paying jobs. But as the recession has demonstrated, college graduates of all races are discovering how difficult it is to find and keep a job.

The evidence for ethnic Asians’ above-average test performance has been called into question. Some studies in which East Asian students outperform European and North American ones on math tests have been criticized for using limited samples of urban Asian students from elite schools. Intelligence expert James Flynn argues that historically, people of Asian ancestry actually possess slightly lower IQ scores than whites but have excelled in math despite this difference. IQ scores can be best described as limited measurements of cognitive ability shaped by complex interactions among genetics, health, psychological attitudes, education, socioeconomic status, and possibly cultural bias.

Studies examining racial differences in intelligence have an ugly history of promoting discriminatory policies based on racial stereotyping. It would be more valuable to look at general “nurture” factors that activate genes critical to intellectual ability and psychological functioning, such as parental involvement in children’s education. APA parents are infamous for pressuring their children to excel academically and enter well-paying, stable professions. In a study of 7,836 San Francisco high school students, APAs spent 40 percent more time on homework than non-Asians.

The portrayal of “Asian American whiz kids” suggests that APAs overachieve through uncanny ability and their immigrant parents’ hard-earned sacrifices. Making model minorities out of these successful individuals, however, overlooks those who struggle. Southeast Asians such as the Hmong and the Laotian are some of the poorest Americans and least likely to graduate from high school, yet they rarely receive adequate governmental assistance because of the model minority perception.

The ignorant conflation of Asian students’ academic performance with Asian Americans’ is problematic given the heterogeneity of the APA population. International students, whose ability to study in the U.S. is often predicated on their scientific and technological expertise, can be mistakenly included in these evaluations.

To make the field more equitable, we must examine what actually determines outcomes for most players. Richard Herrnstein’s and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve launched the IQ craze in 1994 by contending that IQ scores are better predictors of future success than one’s socioeconomic status at birth.  But this is the myth of the American dream: that our inherent abilities, assessed by the limited proxy of IQ tests, combined with dedication will lead to success. Instead of pitting marginalized groups against each other in a draconian struggle for socioeconomic security, we’d be smarter to look beyond our flawed reliance on tests to dictate the extent of our abilities.