Silicon Valley’s Glass Ceiling
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August 8, 2009 at 9:08 PM
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| Asians might power the Silicon Valley revolution, but they do so from the back of the bus. A new study has found that even though Asians are a third of the workforce of Silicon Valley’s largest tech companies, they constitute just 6 percent of board members and 10 percent of corporate officers in the region’s 25 largest companies. Almost half these companies had no Asian board members and fully a fifth had no Asian corporate officers. “There is an underlying belief in the Asian community that there is a corporate glass ceiling,” said Buck Gee, a retired Cisco vice president and former Silicon Valley CEO who co-authored the study. Apple, AMD and Symantec are among the companies without a corporate Asian officer and Intel, Oracle, Chevron and eBay are among those without Asian board members. “Everybody agrees this is the case, but very few Asians are willing to come out and make a stink about it,” Jane Hyun, an executive coach and multicultural leadership strategist, told the San Jose Mercury News. “You don’t see an Asian Al Sharpton-type figure out there. You don’t see people making waves that we haven’t really reached these positions.” |
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