The Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in university admissions early this summer thanks in large part to the charge that Harvard’s practice of race-conscious admissions discriminates against Asian Americans. Whether or not the decision changes the college application process for Asian Americans, it certainly obscures the more insidious and widespread forms of bias that many Asian Americans face. It also opened up pathways to dismantling race-conscious policies elsewhere—particularly in the workplace, where assumptions about what makes a good leader are couched in ideas of race.

Asian Americans are not underrepresented in university classrooms, including at Harvard. They account for 7.2% of the U.S. population, yet 29.9% of Harvard’s incoming class. Where they are underrepresented is in the boardroom and the C-suite. Among the Fortune 500, only 2.4% of CEOs are Asian, two-thirds of whom are South Asian (with roots in the Indian subcontinent, and mainly from India). Many Asian Americans—and especially East Asians (with origins in China, Korea, and Japan)—find themselves hitting a “bamboo ceiling” akin to the glass ceiling that women face. It’s here, in the workplace, where affirmative action has an important role to play in the lives and livelihoods of Asian Americans—one that the Court has put in jeopardy.

Asian Americans lag behind all racial, ethnic, and gender groups in promotion to managerial and executive ranks in spite of their education, work experience, and job performance. Even in fields in which Asians are overrepresented, such as technology, medicine, the natural sciences, engineering, and law, they are rare in leadership.

In top technology firms in Silicon Valley, white men and women are twice as likely as Asian men and women to advance into the executive ranks. Between 1997 and 2008, Asian Americans made up 20% of medical school faculty—yet there were no Asian American deans. And while Black and Latino physicians are underrepresented in the field, Asian Americans are the only racial group that accounts for a much smaller share of medical school department chairs than their percentage of the faculty in medical schools.

A similar pattern emerges in law: Asians comprise 10% of graduates of top-30 law schools, but only 6.5% of all federal judicial law clerks. And while Asians are the largest non-white group in major law firms, they have the highest attrition rates and the lowest ratio of associates to partners of all groups at four-to-one, compared to two-to-one for Blacks and Latinos, and parity for whites. Even in academia, where Asian Americans are overrepresented as students in top universities, they are nearly absent in leadership ranks, comprising only 1.5% of college presidents.

So what forms the branches of the bamboo ceiling?

Some argue that racial and gender stereotypes—technically strong but socially weak, mathematically and scientifically inclined rather than verbally gifted—hinder Asians’ advancement in the workplace. Employers may recognize Asian Americans for their hard work, dedication, and effort without seeing them as innately brilliant, visionary, or skilled to lead.

Asian American women are doubly disadvantaged in this regard: They are the least likely group to be promoted to leadership positions, and to be perceived as fit for leadership roles regardless of their education, experience, and behavior.

Where do these stereotypes come from, and what can be done to combat them? A new strand of research points to differences in culture, and, more specifically, differences in verbal assertiveness between East Asian and white Americans. Western corporate culture prizes individual assertiveness and achievement, whereas East Asian culture promotes harmony and the stability of interpersonal relationships.

To buttress this point, researchers find that South Asians are more verbally assertive than East Asians, and, despite still not being as represented as white men in top positions, South Asian men are now even more likely than white men to attain leadership positions—pointing to a unique pattern of “South Asian exceptionalism.” A similar pattern emerges in law and business schools, where South Asians outperform East Asians in leadership, strategy, and marketing—courses in which verbal assertiveness is prized and class participation accounts for a larger percentage of the final grade. The branches of the bamboo ceiling begin to grow in the classroom.

South Asian exceptionalism may also be explained by Americans’ understanding of who counts as Asian. In the U.S., “Asian” is often shorthand for East Asian, and most Americans—including most Asian Americans—exclude South Asians from the fold. If the stereotypical perception of Asian men (i.e., East Asian men) is that they are diffident, passive, and distant, South Asian men (who are not perceived as Asian) may not be hampered by a social identity that presumes these qualities. The absence of the stereotype may change both their behavior and the way others interpret that behavior.

But a larger question underlying this debate is why we assume that leaders must be bold, brash, and assertive to be effective. Some of the country’s top CEOs have been described as listeners first, and team players who are empathetic, thoughtful, steady, and measured. Columbia University’s new president, Minouche Shafik, is the first woman to lead the university in its 269-year history. When asked about her leadership style, she quoted the 6th-century B.C. Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu: “A leader is best when people barely know they exist … When the leader’s work is done, the people will say, ‘We did it ourselves.’”

Thinking more expansively about the qualities that make a good leader while recognizing that different leadership models may be just as effective (if not more so) than traditional Western ones will broaden leadership opportunities for not only East Asians, but also women, and for many of us who do not fit the prototype of what an American leader looks or acts like. It would also benefit the members of such leaders’ organizations, who may work more effectively with more diverse managers and styles. Leadership comes in many forms, and recognizing and rewarding this will better prepare us to lead and serve the diverse country that we are.

It is the recognition of race, ethnicity, and gender that enables us to identify biases in our understanding of who makes a suitable CEO, president, chair, dean, or manager. Affirmative action policies in the workplace give us the tools to address these biases and remove the barriers they create. Now, even these policies are coming under attack, led by no less than the same conservative advocate who engineered the lawsuit against Harvard.

The fight to dismantle affirmative action in university admissions was never about protecting Asian Americans, yet profiling them abetted the demise of the policy. It also veiled the more rampant forms of bias that Asian Americans face that impede their career mobility. Affirmative action in the workplace paved the way for white women to shatter and break through the glass ceiling. It can help non-white professionals—including Asian Americans—do the same.

The post Where Asian Americans Need Affirmative Action appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

New Yorker staff writer Nicholas Lemann, who moderated the discussion, has been thinking about the subject for over 20 years, since researching his 1999 book about the SAT, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. “What does meritocracy mean to you?” he asked the panelists. And, partly in jest: “Are you for it or against it?”

Economist political editor Adrian Wooldridge, author most recently of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, used the 1958 book where the word first appeared as his starting point. In The Rise of the Meritocracy, British sociologist and politician Michael Young defined meritocracy as “IQ plus effort.” Wooldridge said he would amend this equation slightly: “I would say, minus bias.” Such a merit-based system “judges people according to their promise and measures them by their achievement,” he continued. “I’m very strongly in favor of merit both as a good in itself and as a safeguard against all sorts of evils such as nepotism, corruption, and favoritism.”

Malissia R. Clinton, vice president, general counsel and secretary at The Aerospace Corporation, argued that Americans can’t talk about meritocracy today without acknowledging that we’re not living in one. “The upper echelons are owned exclusively by one group”—white men—”which means we’re not practicing a meritocracy at all,” she said.

Columbia University sociologist Jennifer Lee echoed Clinton, adding that in an ideal meritocracy, “equality and opportunity would generate a high degree of both social stratification and high mobility.” Because the talented—regardless of their social origins—are not rising to the top, “we’re not practicing the ideals by which we believe we are a meritocracy.”

But how ideal is an ideal meritocracy? Lemann offered a hypothetical, asking if the speakers would support a pure meritocracy—but one where 1 percent of the population are rich, 19 percent are scraping by, and 80 percent are dead broke. “Are you OK with that extreme stratification?” he asked.

“I feel like what you defined,” said Clinton to Lemann, “was capitalism.” Is it fair? “If the meritocratic system allows millions of people to live under bridges and barely subsist, it is broken,” she said, acknowledging that many of the same issues arise in communist societies. “Humans are selfish and we’re prone to excess,” she added.

Wooldridge, meanwhile, brought up Glengarry Glen Ross, the 1984 play adapted into a film about desperate real estate salespeople, where the winner gets a Cadillac, the runner-up gets steak knives, and the person who comes in third is fired. “That’s a repugnant society in many ways,” he agreed. But that doesn’t need to be our reality: “It’s very important to replace selection by elimination with selection by differentiation.” And such a system would measure not just academic achievement but other abilities, including compassion and organizational skills.

Lemann revealed that Young, who died in 2002, once told him that meritocracy and aristocracy actually mean the same thing in Greek: “rule by the best.” But because by the 20th century the term was understood as “rule by inheritors,” Young had to invent a new word. “Whatever you define as merit, if you define as merit having blue eyes or whatever, the fortunate part of society is going to figure out how to get blue eyes into their children. All meritocracies would degrade into aristocracies,” said Lemann. Do we live in an aristocracy now?

Lee pointed to a recent study published in the Journal of Labor Economics which shows that nearly 45 percent of the white students Harvard admits are recruited athletes, legacies, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list. “Three-fourths would not have been admitted if it were not for their particular status,” she said. “We forget who [meritocracy] serves and how it continues to reproduce in ways that advantage those who are already advantaged.”

Wooldridge recalled Plato’s strategies for breaking the link of transmitting privileges, which include communal child-bearing (via orgy) and abolishing private property, neither of which Wooldridge recommended. “We need to look for better ways, the best ways possible, of finding promise, wherever it is in society,” he said, including genetics (a fraught and dangerous space, admittedly) and education, particularly in low-income communities.

But education alone isn’t enough to create a fair merit-based system, said Lee. Not only is there the testing trap (which has become a measure of how much students with parental support prepare), but if you beat the odds and succeed in attending an elite university, you are still penalized for racial, gender, and other identities.

And those elite universities only educate a fraction of the population, Lemann added. “Even if we fix the elite university system,” he asked, “what would we do to make life better for everybody else?”

Wooldridge circled back to his earlier call for selection by differentiation: “You need to acknowledge the importance of practical skills and caring skills because we live in a society in which caring is going to become ever more important,” he said.

“I like quotas,” said Clinton. “There’s a forcing function there that’s very powerful and effective.” She added: “It’s OK to end up with some duds and some people who don’t work out. I think that you should reach into your employee base and pull people up.”

Lemann pointed out that quotas almost became the law of the land in 1978. The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ultimately ruled that universities could not use quotas based on race or ethnic origin for admission.

“I was thinking a lot about the current debate of affirmative action and the culture war that’s taking place now—how many people misunderstand what it is,” said Lee, pointing out that in that same decision, the court upheld affirmative action, which allows “institutions to consider race and ethnicity among a myriad of factors to create a university class.”

“I think defending affirmative action, firmly defending affirmative action, is an important part of fostering a more meritocratic system,” Lee added. So is thinking beyond elite universities. Investing in community colleges and canceling student debt would go a long way in serving the greater population, she mused.

With time running short, Lemann turned to audience questions submitted via a live YouTube chat. A number of the questions hummed with the “tremendous amount of populist, anti-meritocratic energy out there on both the left and the right these days,” said Lemann. “Can those without merit lead?”

Returning to Young, Wooldridge pointed out that he actually rejected meritocracy for being “an incredibly cruel thing,” where people at the top of society are incredibly smug, and the people at the bottom are intolerably miserable because they know they should be at the bottom. Today, he argued, the rage against meritocracy “is rooted in a sense of hopelessness at the bottom of society” whether that’s the passage of Brexit or Trump’s rise. That’s why if you ask the people at the bottom of our highly stratified society, he said, they “want to tear the whole thing down.”

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The complaint seems plausible, and it has ignited heated conversations about Asian-Americans and affirmative action. But, as a sociologist who has researched Asian-Americans, stereotypes, and the American education system, I can tell you the allegation is simply wrong, and the conversations tired and misguided. The group making the allegations—and too many other Americans—are looking at discrimination in the wrong setting. Where Asian-Americans face the discrimination is not in schools, but in the workplace.

In my own research, I’ve learned about the hidden ways in which Asian-Americans actually benefit from racial stereotypes in schools. Asian-American students are positively stereotyped by teachers, guidance counselors, and school administrators as smart, high-achieving, and hard-working. The positive racial stereotypes and biases can result in what I’ve called stereotype promise—people expect the best, and that expectation can enhance students’ academic performance.

As a result, Asian-American students are more likely to be placed in more competitive academic tracks, and are more likely to be offered help with their college applications. Hence, if stereotypes and biases are operating in schools, they are typically operating to help, not hurt, Asian-American students. Of course, these positive stereotypes can be a double-edged sword, and make those who do not attain high academic outcomes feel like failures and outliers who do not meet the perceived norm for the Asian-Americans: This is the burden of the model minority trope.

Affirmative action policies do not allow institutions like Harvard to establish racial quotas, but rather give them the right to consider race as one of many factors in making their admissions decisions. Indeed, there are a number of factors that can boost an applicant’s rating, which Harvard’s Dean of Admissions William Fitzsimmons has referred to as “extracurricular distinction and personal qualities,” including whether an applicant is a legacy, an athlete, the first in his or her family to go to college, from a state from which relatively few students apply, or from an economically disadvantaged household. Elite institutions like Harvard seek to create a diverse study body along all of these dimensions, and considering race in admissions helps to achieve that.

While some Asian ethnic groups like Chinese and Koreans—who are highly-educated, on average—may not benefit from affirmative action in education, the reality is that affirmative action policies are needed for less advantaged Asian ethnic groups such as Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong. These groups are disproportionately poor and exhibit higher high school drop-out rates than African-Americans and Latinos. Their disadvantage results in poorer test scores and grades, which would make admission into elite universities difficult if admissions were based on these indicators alone. Affirmative action policies allow universities to consider their disadvantaged status, and also consider how this would contribute to diversity on campus, where students have an opportunity to learn from one another.

Where those Asian-American students who make it through Harvard may truly find stereotypes holding them back is once they graduate and enter the workforce. While positive stereotypes may boost Asian-American students’ performance, the very same stereotypes work against them as they climb the corporate ladder and vie for leadership positions. Asian workers may be perceived as smart and hardworking, but non-Asian employers and peers also perceive them as lacking leadership skills, creativity, and managerial bravado.

A recent study of Silicon Valley’s tech industry showed that while Asian-Americans make up 27.2 percent of the professionals in tech, they comprise only 13.9 percent of executives. Even in the field of education, where Asian-Americans are overrepresented, they are severely underrepresented in leadership positions at the department and university levels. They make up less than 1 percent of corporate board members and about 2 percent of college presidents. Asian-Americans may be facing a “bamboo ceiling,” not unlike the glass ceiling that women face.

How to break down that ceiling? Affirmative action, of course.

I can personally attest to how affirmative action policies help Asian-Americans. Had it not been for the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, which privileges postdoctoral applicants from diverse backgrounds or whose research focuses on diversity issues, I would not be a professor today at the University of California, Irvine. Despite having earned a bachelor’s and a doctoral degree from an Ivy League university, I needed the extra time and support that I received from the postdoctoral fellowship to be a competitive applicant on the academic job market. I am a proud and grateful beneficiary of affirmative action, which surprises my students, most of whom mistakenly believe that affirmative action policies benefit only African-Americans and Latinos.

Most Asian-Americans have come to appreciate affirmative action already. The vast majority of Asian-Americans (69 percent based on the National Asian American Survey) support affirmative action policies in education and the workplace, and more than 135 Asian-American organizations declared their support for affirmative action policies recently. These organizations are more likely to have been founded by U.S.-born Asians, who tend to be more supportive of affirmative action policies than Asian immigrants who are from highly-educated groups like the Chinese, Koreans, Pakistanis, and Asian Indians. U.S.-born Asians are more likely to understand the thorny history of racial groups in the United States, and are more attuned to the subtle and covert experiences of racial bias in their everyday lives.

Americans of Asian heritage are no different than other Americans in wishing to live in a country where educational and work opportunities are open to all, not just a select few. The chances of making it to Harvard, becoming a university president, or having a seat on a corporate board are already slim and unequal at the starting gate. If we chuck affirmative action policies out the window, as the Asian-American plaintiffs would like, we are only narrowing the chances even further for nearly all Americans. And Asian-Americans who complain about racial bias and discrimination in schools will find that they have shot themselves in the foot when they confront bias, discrimination, and the bamboo ceiling in the workplace.

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