In Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling, HR consultant and career coach Jane Hyun explores the noticeable gap between Asian Americans’ educational achievement as a group and their professional advancement. She points to cultural values that may hold them back and offers advice that could be equally helpful to Asian Americans and to the organizations where they work.
As Hyun notes, the 2002 U.S. Census reported that 44 percent of Asian Americans over the age of twenty-five have graduated from college. This is well above the 27 percent average of the total population. So how it is that Asian Americans comprise a mere 1 percent of corporate board membership? Even in Silicon Valley, where Asian Americans represent 30 percent of technology professionals, only around 12 percent of managerial positions are held by Asian Americans compared with 80 percent held by Caucasians. Hyun suggests that these professionals may be struggling with the possibility that corporate mores often conflict with their familial and cultural values.
In Part One, Hyun lays the foundation for understanding these tensions. Confucian values of “filial piety, the importance of family, respect for authority, communal decision making, priority of duty over personal rights, and suppression of feelings” are often at odds with a Western corporate culture based on competition and individualism.
Part Two concentrates on practical advice for making career choices and on job search strategies—from self-assessment to interviewing and networking skills. Finally, Part Three examines how to move up the corporate ladder. Here she covers such topics as learning how to promote oneself and negotiating compensation.
While Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling is directed at Asian Americans, it may also help bosses, clients, and colleagues of Asian Americans as well as HR diversity managers to understand a high-potential yet neglected segment of the business workforce. Hyun succeeds in offering a practical tool kit to answer many questions that Asian American professionals might raise as they strive to adapt to and benefit from Western corporate culture.