Asian women in academia in the United States: their leadership labyrinth and responsive strategy

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Gendered experiences in higher education

Proposal

Asians are widely considered as the “model minority” in the U.S. because of their large enrollment at elite universities and high household incomes (Lee & Zhou, 2015). However, Asian women are among the most underrepresented in the ranks of tenured faculty and full professors which are good pathways for them to leadership posts at colleges and universities (AAUW, 2016). There have been some studies seeking explanations for the underrepresentation of Asian women in leadership in academia in the U.S by examining challenges facing their leadership journey. However, most of research focus on Asian women in senior administrative or executive positions in academia and all of them refer the invisible barriers facing Asian women to the metaphor of "glass ceiling" introduced by Hymowitz and Schellhardt (1986). In reality, as many studies found, women in general and women of color in particular face those barriers in all levels of leadership (Eagly & Carli, 2007). An alternative metaphor - "labyrinth" - is thus used to describe a leadership journey "riddled with challenges all a long the way - not just near the top (Northouse, 2016, p. 399).

The marginalization of Asian women in leadership in academia in the U.S. and the limited research on their underrepresentation in academic leadership give rationales for my study which specifically focuses on their leadership labyrinth. My study replies on the Gender and Leadership Theory and Culture and Leadership Theory synthesized by Northouse (2016); Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) by Bandura (1986), and Cultures of Academy Theory by Bergquish and Pawlak (2008). There are two key inquiries in my study - Asian women's leadership labyrinth ("twists and turns") and their responsive strategies (ways to cope with the "twists and turns").
Qualitative method with the instrument of semi-structure interviews with 20 women from ten states (02 participants in each state) of the largest Asian population in the U.S (California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, Hawaii, Illinois, Washington, Florida, Virginia, and Pennsylvania) . I employ purposive sampling to make sure participants in each state different in race, professional background, and their institutions different in type (public and private institutions) and in history years.

The data collection is divided into two stages. In the first stage (tentatively between August 2018 to February 2019), I conduct interviews with participants in the two top (California and New York) and two bottom states (Pennsylvania and Virginia) of the ten selected states. In the second stage, I continue to do with participants in the remaining selected states.

In data analysis, I employ both deductive and inductive approaches. With deductive approach, I identify codes based on the theoretical framework I have chosen as my study's foundation. With inductive approach, I label codes under new category(ies) and theme(s) for emergent codes arising from my analysis of the original data. Open coding and axial coding are the two stages of coding my interview data.

Since I have been collecting data in the first stage as I noted above, I cannot highlight any findings in this abstract. However, I am convinced at the CIES Conference in April 2019, I can present my robust results of my study in the first stage.

Author

• Dao T Nguyen, University of Pittsburgh