This Etsy product manager says Asians experience racism too

Last fall Jason Shen had a thought about racism, specifically, that he, an Asian-American man, feels it.
He had a conversation with an Asian friend of his who works in medicine, and he felt it, too. And then he wondered how many other Asian men feel it.
So he made a poll and published it online. Some 354 Asian men, many of them in his social network, responded. And guess what? They felt racism as well. Shen published the results in a blog post entitled, The Asian American Man Study — 2015 Results.

“Human beings inevitably categorize people,” Shen said in an interview. “As long as the rest of the world continues to talk about race, it matters.”

Some of the takeaways from the study:

• Most Asian American men feel they are treated worse than white people but better than non-Asian minorities.
• Nearly all Asian men have been made uncomfortable by some kind of racial stereotype, the most common ones being “good at math,” “small penis” and “good with computers.”
• Nearly half of Asian men have heard someone say “I don’t date Asian men” in their presence.

Shen works as a product manager for Etsy and lives in Williamsburg. Before that, after graduating from Stanford, he founded a ride-sharing startup which was accepted to Y Combinator. He worked on that for a few years before moving to New York to work for Percolate.
One of the things he’s found in his experience are that the stereotypes about Asian men tend to delegitimize their work. For instance, the idea that Asians are just naturally better at math and computers devalues the work that people had to put in to get good at that stuff. He also said that although Asians make up 27 percent of employees in tech companies, they only make up 13 percent of executives.

“When we talk about diversity in technology we talk about what percentage are not white or Asian,” he said. “And I think there is a need to see more women and Latino and people of color, but to sort of group Asian and whites together and say, ‘You’re basically the same,’ I don’t think that’s accurate.

“If you’re a white man you have a far better chance of rising to the top than an asian man or woman,” Shen added. “According to our survey, something to the effect of 62 percent of Asian men feel that there are some race-related obstacles blocking their career trajectory. I doubt the same number of white men would say that.”

Shen is aware that on the whole Asian people don’t have it as bad in the racism department as other groups, but also thinks that you don’t have to be the worst-treated to talk about being mistreated. He said that just talking about the issue is a benefit.

“This is not meant to be like, ‘Look at how tough we have it,’ but people just don’t know what it’s like,” Shen said. “Maybe this will help you have a little more empathy when you interact with them if you don’t know them personally. Just to shed a little more light on their lives.”