Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions [pdf]

Not Harvard, but (being Asian American) this sort of soft characterization as being deficient in personality metrics rings true in my head.

For starters, my father in his full time government job repeatedly got "no leadership potential" reviews. Meanwhile in his part time job with the US Navy, he advanced to the level of captain and in his final act for the Navy led a team that completed its first fully digitized inventory system, saving the Navy billions of dollars, and delivered it under budget and ahead of time. (Fwiw he was non-technical, just "good at making things happen for nerds", his words not mine)

In my personal life, I've encountered several situations where people have expressed to me explicitly or implicitly they didn't consider me to be leader-worthy despite my having successfully managed small teams several times in my career.

Cultural differences are big here too.

Asian American culture leads to personalities which are not considered leadership-worthy in WASP culture. You're not alone there. The same is true for people from most cultures -- African immigrants, Eastern European immigrants, and most other types of immigrants behave in ways which are too foreign.

It's not universal -- there are individuals who manage to culturally adapt. But they're a minority, and it's an uphill battle.

Actual performance tends to be excellent, but that's not how leaders get chosen in most organizations. Leadership decisions are almost entirely about perception: Do your employees like you and relate well to you? Your superiors? That has a huge cultural component, and a lot of room for racism.

Why do you assume my dad was an immigrant. His side of the family has been in the Hawaii since the 1880s, before it even became a territory. My father was born in post WWII America to two born in America citizens.

His master chief was black, his executive officer was a woman, and his head programmer was white. He was universally loved in the Navy community, especially by his subordinates, and though he did ruffle some feathers with his superiors, I can't believe he pissed them off too much, since they even honored him with a full page cartoon of him explaining his achievement with two other O6s and an O5, and twice with the legion of merit, which you don't get (much less twice) if the admirals are displeased.