RSF: The “Model Minority” Goes to Work

Stereotyped as “model minorities” who excel in the classroom, Asian Americans are more highly educated than all other US groups. Once in the labor market, they outearn White Americans. Some believe this is evidence that White privilege, racial bias, and gender discrimination are fictitious narratives of a liberal “woke” agenda. Others use it as proof that confirms their stereotypes that Asian Americans are inherently smarter and harder working than other groups. While much attention has focused on Asian Americans’ academic achievement, far less research considers whether their later careers mirror their early success. In this issue of RSF, sociologists Jennifer Lee, Kimberly Goyette, Xi Song, and Yu Xie, management scholar Jackson G. Lu, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how Asian Americans fare in the workplace.

The ten articles in this issue examine the ways in which Asian Americans, because of geographic clustering, are advantaged at a national level but disadvantaged at the regional level; how gender, family, and marriage impact Asian Americans in the workplace; and the different ways Asian Americans strategically adapt to the labor market. Robert Manduca and Jane Furey reveal that while on aver-age Asian Americans outearn White Americans at a national level, when compared to Whites living in the same metropolitan area, Asians earn only 88 percent as much. Sharon Sassler and Gabrielle Sorresso find that among computer science professionals, Indian women have a larger gender wage gap than White and Chinese women and experience larger marriage and parenthood penalties in earnings. Sojung Lim and Wonjeong Jeong show that Asian women are more likely to live with extended family than White women, leading to higher rates of employment among Asian women with children. Angelina Grigoryeva finds that Asian Americans are more likely to receive stock-based compensation than White Americans because they are more likely to work in jobs where stock options are provided. Asians and Whites working in the same types of jobs are equally likely to receive stock-based compensation and in similar amounts. Shih-Chun “Steven” Chien and colleagues find that despite being the fastest-growing racial minority group entering the legal profession, Asian Americans are underrepresented in leadership positions. They attribute this pattern in part to employers’ pervasive stereotypes that Asian Americans lack traits typically associated with leadership, such as creativity and assertiveness.

This issue of RSF reveals that the perception of the Asian American advantage in the workplace is illusory, and the contributors shed light on the lived experiences of the “model minority” when it goes to work.