Employment among Asian Americans

Significance: Asian Americans have generally reaped benefits from both human capital (skills, education, training) and social capital (networks of kin and friends) in regard to employment.

Employment among Asian Americans can be examined along several dimensions. Statistics consistently indicate that Asian Americans are generally well educated in comparison to other racial and ethnic groups. Asian Americans might thus be expected to have high labor-force participation rates and to be concentrated in occupations that require high levels of schooling. At the same time, the Asian American population is quite diverse. Some ethnic groups—for example, Asian Indian and Japanese Americans—have generally high levels of schooling and incomes, while others, such as Cambodian and Vietnamese Americans, have high poverty rates and lower incomes.

Labor Force Participation and Unemployment Rates

Data based on the March, 1997, Current Population Survey (CPS) show that the Asian American labor-force participation rate is slightly higher than the national rate. For the US population in general, 66.8 percent of people aged sixteen and older were in the civilian labor force. More than 68 percent of Asian Americans sixteen years and older were in the civilian labor force. More than 95 percent of Asian Americans in the civilian labor force were employed, compared with 94 percent of all Americans. Therefore, the unemployment rate of Asian Americans was slightly lower: 4.7 percent compared with a national rate of 5.6 percent.

Labor-force participation rates by gender are consistent with the overall patterns. Asian American men and women are slightly more likely to be in the labor force, and their unemployment rates are also lower. For example, 62 percent of Asian American women are in the labor force, compared with 60 percent of all American women.

Data on labor-force participation rates for specific Asian American groups based on the 1990 census reveal that, among persons sixteen and older, Filipinos and Asian Indians have the highest labor-force participation rates (more than 70 percent), while Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmongs have the lowest.

Class of Employment

Class of employment is an important dimension of employment for the Asian American population because of the large numbers of foreign-born Asian Americans (more than 60 percent of Asian Americans are foreign-born). Research shows that immigrants are more likely than natives to be self-employed, because lack of English proficiency and knowledge of the general job market make it more difficult to secure employment in the private and public sectors. Surprisingly, data from the March, 1997, CPS indicate that Asian Americans are as likely as other Americans to be employed as private wage-and-salary workers: 78 percent of employed Asian Americans aged sixteen years and older were in this class of employment, as were 77.5 percent of all employed Americans aged sixteen and older. The main differences are in the percentages employed in the public sector and the percentages who are unpaid family workers. For all employed Americans, more than 14 percent worked as federal, state, or local government workers, compared with 12.7 percent of Asian Americans. Slightly more Asian Americans were self-employed workers (9 percent versus 8 percent), and nearly 1 percent of Asian Americans were unpaid family workers, compared with just 0.1 percent of all employed Americans.

Education Levels and Occupational Categories

Forty-two percent of Asian Americans have a bachelor’s or higher degree, compared with 26 percent of US whites, 13 percent of US blacks, and 10 percent of US Hispanics. About 15 percent of Asian Americans and US whites have less than a high school education, compared with 25 percent of US blacks and 45 percent of US Hispanics. The types of occupations in which Asian Americans are employed reflect these educational attainment patterns. According to the March, 1997, CPS data, more than 35 percent of employed Asian Americans work in managerial and professional specialty jobs, compared with the national figure of 29 percent. There are no significant differences in the percentages employed in technical, sales, and administrative support jobs (29.8 percent of both Asian Americans and all Americans) or in service jobs (13.8 percent of Asian Americans and 13.5 percent of all Americans). However, fewer Asian Americans (1.2 percent) work in farming, forestry, and fishing jobs in comparison with all Americans (2.5 percent) and in high-skilled blue-collar jobs (6.5 percent of Asian Americans compared with 11 percent of all workers).

Gender differences in employment patterns also exist. A higher percentage of Asian American men (38 percent) work in managerial and professional jobs compared with all US men (28 percent), while Asian American women are as likely as all US women to be employed in this occupational category. Asian American men are less likely to be employed as skilled or unskilled workers (25 percent versus 38 percent of all U.S. men), but Asian American women are more likely to work as unskilled workers. More than 12 percent of Asian American women work as operators, fabricators, or laborers, compared with 7 percent of all US women workers. These statistics are consistent with research on the employment of many immigrant women (primarily Asian and Hispanic) in such industries as garment manufacturing.

Data from the 1990 census provide information on occupational differences across Asian ethnic groups. Almost 44 percent of Asian Indians worked as managers or professionals, as did about 37 percent of Chinese and Japanese Americans. In contrast, almost 40 percent of Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmongs worked as low and unskilled operators and laborers, compared with less than 10 percent of Asian Indians, Japanese, and Chinese. These ethnic group variations reflect educational differences and other factors associated with each group’s history in the United States.

Earnings Disparity and the Glass Ceiling

Although Asian American participation in the labor force and occupational distributions suggest an overall picture of a minority group that is firmly integrated into the US labor market and economy, there is compelling evidence indicative of unequal treatment of Asian Americans by employers. Unequal treatment can be observed in two important ways. First, Asian Americans may be paid less than whites in relation to such factors as education, experience, and occupation. Second, Asian Americans may not be promoted as quickly or as highly as white coworkers, a phenomenon known as the “glass ceiling.” In the words of one scholar, the glass ceiling metaphor refers to “artificial barriers based on attitudinal or organizational bias that prevent qualified individuals from advancing upward in their organization.”

Evidence of unequal pay comes from an analysis of 1990 census data that compared median annual earnings of Asian and white American engineers and scientists. The researchers chose to compare these two groups because Asian Americans made up less than 3 percent of the 1990 US population but made up almost 6 percent of the total engineering workforce. The findings showed that at all levels of education, Asian Americans had lower median annual earnings than whites. For example, white engineers with a bachelor’s degree had median annual earnings of $40,800, while for Asian American engineers with similar education, the level was $37,000. For those with doctoral degrees, median annual earnings were $57,200 for white engineers and $54,000 for Asian Americans. Other researchers have reported similar evidence of earnings disparity, underlining a persistent pattern of lower rates of return on education and occupation among Asian Americans.

It is more difficult to document glass ceiling experiences and to demonstrate racial discrimination in regard to promotions and career advancements. Nevertheless, recognition of a glass ceiling and its effects on racial minorities and women resulted in the creation of the federal Glass Ceiling Commission in 1991. The commission’s report was published in 1995 and provided evidence that Asian Americans, like other racial minorities and women, were less likely to advance into high-level management positions than were white men. Often, white men with less experience would be promoted over Asian Americans. Some researchers suggest that top-level managers (almost all white men) do not view Asian Americans as potential managers, regardless of their educational attainment or experience. Thus, an important reason for Asian Americans’ experiences with the glass ceiling may lie in employers’ attitudes and their acceptance of stereotypes of Asian Americans. Additionally, because a high percentage of Asian Americans are foreign-born, their employment experiences may also be affected by employers’ attitudes toward immigrants for whom English is a second language.

Asian Americans are participating in the labor force at levels equal to or higher than national rates. Because of their generally high levels of educational attainment, a relatively high percentage of Asian Americans are employed in managerial and professional jobs. Because of the diversity of the Asian American population, however, some Asian ethnic groups are not as well educated and are clustered in blue-collar occupations requiring fewer skills. Finally, there is evidence suggesting that all Asian Americans, including the most well-educated and those who work in professional and managerial jobs, experience earnings inequality and other glass ceiling effects. Thus, while Asian Americans are unlike other racial minorities in their educational and occupational profiles, they may share similar obstacles in employment.

Bibliography

Information on Asian Americans and employment may be found in Sharon M. Lee’s “Asian Americans: Diverse and Growing” (Population Bulletin 53, no. 2); Global Production: The Apparel Industry in the Pacific Rim (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), edited by Edna Bonacich et al.; Miriam Ching Louie’s “After Sewing, Laundry, Cleaning, and Cooking, I Have No Breath Left to Sing” (Amerasia Journal 18, no. 1); the U.S. Department of Labor’s A Report on the Glass Ceiling Initiative (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1991); Paul Ong and Evelyn Blumenberg’s “Scientists and Engineers,” in The State of Asian Pacific America: Economic Diversity, Issues, and Policies (Los Angeles: LEAP Asian Pacific Public Policy Institute and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1994), edited by Paul Ong; “Education, Occupational Prestige, and Income of Asian Americans,” by Herbert Barringer et al. (Sociology of Education 63, 1990); the federal Glass Ceiling Commission’s Good for Business: Making Full Use of the Nation’s Human Capital (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, 1995); Deborah Woo’s The Glass Ceiling and Asian Americans: A Research Monograph (Washington, D.C.: Glass Ceiling Commission, U.S. Department of Labor, 1995); Joyce Tang’s “Caucasians and Asians in Engineering: A Study in Occupational Mobility and Departure” (Research in the Sociology of Organizations 11, 1993); Marilyn Fernandez’s “Asian Indian Americans in the Bay Area and the Glass Ceiling” (Sociological Perspectives 41, no. 1, 1998); and Timothy P. Fong’s The Contemporary Asian American Experience: Beyond the Model Minority (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1998).