Study: Asians hit a bamboo ceiling in the high tech industry

 Diversification efforts at Google are underway.

BAMBOO is pliant, but strong. According to a new report, Asian men in Silicon Valley find it difficult to break through the Bamboo Ceiling if they try advancing to the leadership ranks.

Lest we forget, besides the gender gap exposed in the Ellen Pao lawsuit, the high tech industry is still grappling with its well documented diversity divide.

It is most evident in the well-stocked cafeterias and coffee cafes of the high tech headquarters in San Francisco and down the peninsula in Silicon Valley. While you see a plethora of beige-skinned Asian faces downing the gourmet fare offered by the companies, in the board rooms, the shade is a good deal paler.

Google, Yahoo and other major technology companies are far more inclined to hire Asians as computer programmers than to promote them to become managers or executives, according to a study released May 6.

The analysis brought to light what is obvious to the Asian American community, the high tech giants have no problem in hiring Asian as workers in non-management positions, but when picking managers and executives, human resources prefer to hire European American men.

RELATED: Three Asian women challenge Silicon Valley culture

To be clear, there are more minorities in executive positions than there were three years ago, but progress is moving at a snail's pace. Fixing Silicon Valley's apparent preference for white males won't happen quickly.

"We have a lot more work to do," said Laszlo Bock, Google's head of human resources or as Google would say, 'people operations.'For a long time we'll have a lot more work to do."

Ascend, a group focused on Asian business issues, based its conclusions on 2013 data filed with U.S. employment regulators by five Silicon Valley companies — Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and LinkedIn Corp.

Minorities seek a place at the table in Silicon Valley.

"If you step in the cafeteria of any of these five companies, you will see plenty of Asian talent around," said Denise Peck, a co-author of the Ascend study and former vice president at computer networking equipment maker Cisco Systems. "It's only when you walk into the executive suites at these companies that you might see a problem."

Google knows it's got problems with diversity among its ranks, and it was one of the first in Silicon Valley to say so.

The search giant first released statistics last May about women and minorities in its workforce, and by its own admission they were bad. So, it's tried to find fixes, and it's talked about some of those programs publicly. One of them focuses on what it calls "unconscious bias," or cases of discrimination that aren't overt or even intentional, and it now has a program devoted to the problem.

But fixing Silicon Valley's preference for white males won't happen immediately.

"When we released the composition of our workforce almost a year ago, it confirmed what many people suspected: the tech industry needs to do a lot more when it comes to diversity," says vice president of people operations Nancy Lee in her official Google blog.

After their workforce report was released, Google launched several long-term initiatives and spent $115 million to diversify their workers. Other tech firms such as Intel and Apple followed Google's lead and began their own programs. 

The Ascend report found that Asians held 27 percent of the professional jobs yet only 14 percent were executives. For whites, the percentages are reverse: whites held 62 percent of the professional jobs at the studied companies, but filled 80 percent of the executive jobs. Hmmm.

Ascend, a group focusing on Asian business issues, concludes that the lack of Asian executives may be partly blamed on cultural differences. It's curious that a group focusing on Asian issues should bring up that old stereotype of the nonassertive Asian male. I could never understand how the self-promotion and braggadocio is admired in white males, but the nose-to-the-grindstone, lead-by-example and working as a team are seen as weaknesses in Asian males.

What should have been concluded is that the top leaders tend to prefer seeing themselves in their underling managers. The current leadership want to surround themselves with people with whom they feel comfortable, with whom they can indulge in common pursuits, have drinks, play video games, share joke, play golf. You know, sort of like a buddy.

In many ways, Asian males face the same double standard often placed on women in the workplace: assertive males good, assertive women bitches.

"With an organization of our size, meaningful change will take time," wrote Lee in her blog.  "From one year to the next, bit by bit, our progress will inch forward."

The nerd culture that spawned many of the innovators who in turn gave birth to Silicon Valley, also gave rise to the 21st century version of the old boys club. In extreme cases, that environment allowed, some say even encouraged, distorted values of privilege, exclusiveness and misogamy.

Once the high-tech industry can find ways to develop leaders from its Asian workers, then they can begin to grapple with the even worse plight of African Americans and Latinos, who constitute barely a blip in the industry's workforce.  

Though there are signs of change - such as Satya Nadella as Microsoft's CEO - that shift is coming slow. The industry is trying to compensate by investing in education, expanded recruitment efforts and bringing in foreign workers but it will never truly have permanent, institutional change until it can look at itself in the mirror and see an image, not only of its  workforce, but also the world market where lies its future. That, is the bottomline.

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