Asian Americans and Occupational Segregation

• In Event: 50260 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 2: Challenging the Model Minority Myth: Work, Health, and Inequality Among Asian Americans

Abstract

Research on Asian Americans and their status in the U.S. tends to focus on educational attainment or income. We explore an understudied form of potential status inequality between Asian Americans and White Americans: occupational segregation. This study examines the occupational distribution of Asian American men and women in comparison to their White peers, tracing the evolution of occupational segregation between the two over the past three decades (from 1990 to 2022) using data from the Census and American Community Survey from 1990 to 2018-2022. Occupational segregation is examined by gender, immigrant generation, and levels of education. By utilizing individual-level assessment of dissimilarity index in a series of regression-based analyses, we find the level of occupational segregation is more pronounced by immigrant generation than gender. Differences in the distribution of education plays a large role regardless of the immigrant generation and gender.

Authors

• Andrew Taeho Kim, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• Hyunjoon Park, University of Pennsylvania

• Phoebe Ho, University at Buffalo