Week 1 - Ethan Chiang A01

Ethan Chiang
Section A01
Week 1

This week's reading is "Fight the Tower: A Call to Action for Women of Color in Academia." by Professor Valverde. It is all most heart-broken to read about what Professor Valverde had to go through to get her tenure. One would think that the higher your education you had the more you will know about why discrimination is wrong. It is truly inspiring to read about how Professor Valverde fought through her coma and recover even she is technically "dead" for 90 minutes. I am a father of an 8 mo. old and I will do anything just to stay by his side for one more day. Throughout my education, I can say that I can count the number of female professors I had in one hand and among them less then half are non-white.

As an Asian male major in Computer Science, I feel that I am also being put in a disadvantage not because I am a minority, in fact, because I am the majority.

Asian made up the majority of the workforce in the tech industry, some domestic and some foreign. And among that most are male. One would think that this is a good thing that Asian are the majority. Yet in fact, we see that the executives are still mostly non-Asain. Some Asians can even feel that they are being seen as a treat, that they are taking over the game just like in college admissions. I found this interesting because somehow when you are winning in numbers still cannot beat the power already in place.

Question: Are we seeing more female, non-white professor around in the recent years?

References:
Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde. “Fight the Tower: A Call to Action for Women of Color in Academia.”
Graph "Asian are now the majority for tech" by Dave Nakaso, 2012. Retrieved Jan 13 2019 from https://www.mercurynews.com/2012/11/29/asian-workers-now-dominate-silicon-valley-tech-jobs/.