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.

> Asian American culture leads to personalities which are not considered leadership-worthy in WASP culture.

On the face of it, there is no way to tell if this is the actual cause of a phenomenon or merely a rationalization for an irrational bias.

One might invoke Occam's razor at this point, and say that the simplest explanation - that it is the actual cause, not a rationalization for something else - is the most probable one, but:

"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."

- the more one advances this point, the more clearly it becomes obvious that foreign-ness is the one common factor in all the cases.

Based on your last paragraph, I think we are both making essentially the same point.

Except that this pattern doesn't hold for Indian immigrants. (The research is out there, I invite you to go find it.) So it's not fundamentally about foreignness, but rather about the uneven distribution of certain qualities amongst different population groups.

One could argue that the problem is at root with the American? Western? structural bias in favor of extroversion and assertiveness, but you need de-mystify the dynamics involved in the first place to make that case clearly.

No one wants to go on a wild-goose chase for research that you seem to think is credible but won’t even bother posting for discussion