SAN JOSE — As Silicon Valley companies seek to diversify their ranks and address the glaring absence of women, black and Latino engineers, a new report says they are overlooking a problem hidden in plain sight.
Asian-Americans are well-represented at the Bay Area’s leading technology firms, but few rise to the ranks of management and even fewer are in executive positions, according to an analysis of the employment records of Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, LinkedIn and Yahoo by the Ascend Foundation.
The gap is starkest for Asian women. Only one of every 285 Asian women at those companies is an executive, compared with one of every 87 white men.
“White women have a 42 percent disadvantage. Asian women have a 260 percent disadvantage,” said Buck Gee, a former Cisco Systems vice president who co-authored the report released Wednesday.
“There’s clearly something going on.”
This newspaper reported two years ago, using U.S. Census data, that Asian-Americans make up half of the Bay Area’s technology workforce, surpassing whites as the largest group. But Ascend’s new study shows those numbers don’t follow the pipeline into management and the executive suite. The nonprofit organization advocates for and mentors Asian-American professionals around the country.
Asians occupy 27.2 percent of professional jobs at the tech firms, but only 13.9 percent of executive jobs, according to data those five companies filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2013. Such analysis is possible because more companies, led by Google, began publicly disclosing employment demographics last year amid public pressure to raise awareness and narrow the diversity gap. Intel and Cisco had already published their demographic data.
When LinkedIn revealed its employee statistics in June, “we acknowledged that we had work to do in order to create greater diversity at our company,” spokesman Doug Madey said. “We have been making progress, with several programs and partnerships in place,” and the number of Asians in leadership roles has since grown.
Google, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo declined to comment on the report or did not respond to requests.
The researchers found similar trends at eBay and Cisco. Other companies — including Apple and Facebook — were not included in Ascend’s report because their public disclosures do not reveal enough detailed information about diversity within management ranks.
The researchers created what they call an “executive parity index” to compare racial and gender representation between a tech company’s rank-and-file workforce and its leadership.
The report calculates that race is significantly stronger than gender in layering a glass ceiling over Asian workers, especially Asian women who face a “double whammy” of barriers. Although she never alleged racial bias, Ellen Pao’s high-profile gender discrimination trial against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers earlier this year and recent lawsuits against Facebook and Twitter have brought attention to the frustration of some Asian-American women in the industry.
Report co-author Janet Wong, a retired partner of auditing firm KPMG, said her Chinese-American upbringing taught her that “studying hard, getting good grades was all I needed to be successful.”
But then she watched as colleagues, especially white men, eased up the management ladder and she fell behind.
“I would say, ‘I don’t have time to go to lunch, I don’t have time to get drinks, because I have to get my work done.’ But then I realized I needed to do other things,” Wong said. “I realized the soft skills were also important, building relationships.”
The report does not distinguish between Asian-Americans who grew up in the United States and Asian immigrants who migrated as adults for college or work. Highly skilled immigrants recruited by Silicon Valley tech firms often face additional barriers because their work visas are temporary and tied to specific jobs, limiting their mobility and negotiating power until they can get a green card.
Regardless of origin, Gee said traditional family values can conflict with U.S. corporate culture if Asian workers don’t get the right kind of mentoring. But just as important, subtle bias against Asian workers can hinder their upward mobility when non-Asian executives in charge of hiring and promotion lack awareness.
“Asians are perceived as better engineers but poor leaders. Even if you want to be a leader, and show that (you can), there’s implicit bias that you aren’t,” said Gee, who is Chinese-American and worked in the tech world for three decades.
Contact Matt O’Brien at 408-920-5011. Follow him at Twitter.com/mattoyeah.
