Asian American Women’s Workplace Experiences: A Review and Application of Gendered Race Theory and the Intersectional Prototypicality Model

Abstract

Asian American women, who make up a growing proportion of the workforce, face unique intersectional forms of workplace discrimination and bias based on being both a racial and gender minority. In this review, we take an intersectional approach, applying social psychological research on gendered race theory and Wong and McCullough’s Intersectional Prototypicality Model, to document as well as explain how race and gender concomitantly inform the challenges and barriers Asian American women face in the workplace. Specifically, we review evidence that the category “Asian” is frequently associated with femininity, and that this in turn leads Asian American women to be viewed as hyper-prototypical or hypo-prototypical given the context of their work. We describe how this alignment or misalignment explains Asian American women’s workplace experiences across multiple domains including hiring, promotion, negotiation, and workplace harassment. By explicitly considering the intersection of race and gender, we conclude by articulating novel solutions and implications for creating better workplace environments for Asian American women.