The Majority Minority

In Silicon Valley, Asian American tech workers seem to have made it. Why doesn’t it feel that way?

- Ellen Huet and Priya Anand

Silicon Valley executives sometimes seem to believe they are proprietors of a post-racial paradise. The industry’s corporate campuses abound with immigrants, its investors say they like to bet on underdogs, and its biggest companies preach the gospel of workplace inclusivity. “Diversity is a foundational value for us,” Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., said last year. “We probably have more resources invested in diversity now than at any point in our history as a company.”

The demographics of Alphabet and its peers, of course, tell a different story: Big tech companies employ few Black or Hispanic workers and almost none in technical or executive roles. On the other hand, there’s some basis to see Silicon Valley as a beacon of progress in the representation of Asian Americans, who account for a quarter of the population in the Bay Area. Alphabet, DoorDash, and Zoom all have Asian American CEOs. Pichai, who’s originally from southern India, leads a company where more than 40% of the U.S. workforce is Asian. At Facebook Inc., the figure is even higher, and Asian employees slightly outnumber White ones.

And yet, even here—among workers who seem to have found significant success in the tech industry—the story is more complicated, and discouraging. Many Asian Americans in tech, especially women, face subtle yet ever-present discrimination. It takes many forms: sexualized comments, assumptions based on stereotypes (“You must be great at programming!”), or performance reviews that seem to be more about identity than actual performance. The racism starts at the earliest stages of their careers and builds as they break into middle management. It can be hard to escape even for those who become executives.