SEPTEMBER 16, 2022

Hello, everyone!

Analysis from consulting group McKinsey found that Asian Americans on the board of director levels drops significantly, and Asian American women experience a severe drop of 80%.

While Asian Americans are represented widely in corporate and high-paying jobs, Asian Americans are also highly concentrated in low-paying occupations including professions like manicurists and cooks. The community has a large presence at the entry level, but the organization details that Asian American worker representation drops to less than half in higher levels of the corporate world.

This contributes to income inequality within ethnic demographics in the community. But how do Asian women compare to Asian men? As far as gender is involved, promotions for Asian women are one for every two Asian men in senior managerial levels, and drops to one for every six Asian men at the C-suite executive level.

According to Margaret Chin, a sociologist and the author of “Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don’t Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder,” Asian women not only contend with general sexism within the workplace, but face a racial dimension to their gendered experience, often typecast as hyperfeminine, acquiescent and compliant - all of which are barriers keeping them from contending for leadership roles.

Spotlight 💡

Ying Ling, who was a Vietnam war activist, author, school teacher, and Berkeley, California’s first Asian American city council member, has died at age 90.

Ling was a first generation Chinese American who immigrated to the U.S. with her mother at 13. She held a career in teaching for 21 years while participating in many left-wing political movements for anti-war and racial justice activism, especially as someone who experienced Japanese militarism firsthand.

Her presence on the city council propelled campus student protests during the Vietnam war. Later in her life, she worked with U.S. Representatives Ronald Dellums and Barbara Lee, and was a volunteer for Grandmothers Against the War, an anti-Iraq War group.

California’s superintendent of public instruction, Tony Thurmond, described Ling as “a social justice leader and warrior” to which the community owes “a debt of gratitude.” Thurmond hopes that Ling’s legacy and leadership continues to inspire community members and hopes that “everyone in public service and in advocating would take a page out of her book and stand up for the causes that she believed in.”

Race in America 🌎

Korean American point and shooting guard Kianna Smith is likely to be the top pick for the Women’s Korean Basketball League (WKBL) draft on Friday.

The WKBL rules allow for non-Korean athletes to join if they have at least one Korean parent, and Smith, who “always wanted to learn more about (her) mother’s home country,” has become a talented player who topped the 3x3 basketball qualifiers and was almost named MVP for the United States national team.

Last week, the words “bahn mi,” “omakase,” “maitake,” and 370 other words were added to the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary.

Andrea Nguyen, who grew up in an America that did not value or know Asian foods very well, is now a recipe developer and author of “The Banh Mi Handbook.” She explains that with Asian words entering into the English lexicon, it signals an “acceptance,” she says, “Like, ‘No, you’re no longer foreign.’” But she does have one qualm with the definition. The dictionary describes banh mi as “spicy” but Nguyen argues that “it doesn’t have to be spicy. You can have no chili, just salt and pepper on that sandwich. By saying ‘spicy,’ I feel like it further exoticizes the sandwich.”

Associate professor of Food Studies at New York University, Krishnendu Ray, added that it’s a reflection of our changing world, that ”the future of American food has a strong Asianization.”

In Other Asian News 🗞

Ocean Conservancy, an environmental watchdog, retracted their previous statement on a 2015 report titled “Stemming the Tide” that blamed five Asian countries for the majority of plastic waste pollution in the ocean.

After its initial publication, many environmental, health and social justice advocacy groups decried its statements. On Wednesday, Ocean Conservancy apologized for the harm the report caused. Gaia, an international alliance of 800 waste-reduction groups around the globe, and Break Free From Plastic, a movement of more than 2,000 global organizations, welcomed the apology. Froilan Grate, Gaia’s Asia-Pacific coordinator, explained that this report retraction “is an opportunity to interrupt decades of waste colonialism” and “raise awareness among other organizations and policymakers about the false narrative propagated by the report.”
 

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In Australia, Asian immigrant women are facing a racial element in addition to sexual harassment incidents.

Migrant workers like Susan, the Thai woman mentioned in the article, recall instances where men in their workplaces either try to touch them or say inappropriate comments multiple times. For Susan, the professional massage therapist, many of her clients expected “happy endings” after receiving a massage, referencing the misconception that Asian spas and massage businesses are fronts for sex services. Some men have tried to touch her body, tried to “bargain” a price for sexual favors, or find a moment where they can expose their naked bodies to her.

Now, as a business woman who runs her own massage business, she still receives multiple texts and calls per week asking about “happy endings,” remembering how frightened she was when she was still a student and struggled to communicate when these instances occurred. She notes that younger staff who struggle with English are often the ones who experience more incidents.

Funded by ANROWS, a research institution that studies the effects of violence against women and their children, researchers at Monash University are investigating the phenomenon with two women’s advocacy groups, Harmony Alliance and the National Women’s alliance.

Entertainment 📺

Japanese British singer Rina Sawayama is joining the lineup for the #iVoted livestream music festival. 

The event will feature over 400 artists and will take place on November 8. Starting on September 26, people who take a selfie outside their polling place or with their ballot at home and submit it to the iVoted site can be entered into a sweepstake for Sawayama’s upcoming concert. Her second album, “Hold the Girl,” drops today.   

CAPE (Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment) has unveiled its new class of creative executives in the organization’s sixth annual CAPE Leaders Fellowship program.

The program aims to cultivate rising executives in the creative arts to break into VP roles and beyond.  
 

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Indian American actor Shoba Narayan chats about her lead Broadway role in Aditya Chopra’s “Come Fall In Love – The DDLJ Musical.”

Narayan plays the character of a young woman slated for an arranged marriage back in India, but she instead spends a summer in Europe and falls for someone else. Narayan said, “The fact that we have an Indian musical headed to Broadway feels incredibly personal and monumental to me as an Indian American actor who was raised by Indian immigrant parents, and who loves Bollywood films, Broadway, and Indian fine arts.”

What else is on our minds? 🧠
 

• Hundreds of Filipino workers are stranded on an island in a work dispute with their U.S. contractor. 

• The latest viral Korean beauty skincare secret - salmon sperm. 

• Pianist Lang Lang has released a new album, “The Disney Book,” featuring 27 rearranged Disney songs. 

• Groups in Arizona are hoping to galvanize voter turnout in the Asian American community. 

• A profile from the New Yorker about the misconceptions and myths of American manufacturing and its dynamic with China.