From the outside looking in, her Wall Street CV seems impeccable: Columbia, Princeton, Salomon Brothers, Merrill Lynch and, finally, a top job at JPMorgan.
None of that protected Joyce Chang from encountering hate in her daily life.
One moment, she was taking in Chinatown, just north of New York’s Financial District. The next, racist slurs were being hurled at her from a passing car.
The ugliness of the past year—the racism in the streets, the waves of anti-Asian violence, the deadly shooting rampage in the Atlanta area—have lit fires of fear among the nation’s almost 23 million people of Asian descent.
But the events have also carried a special resonance on Wall Street, where powerful institutions are confronting one reckoning after another over race and inequality—and where Asian Americans often occupy an uncomfortable middle ground.
On one level, they face many of the same hurdles as other minorities in the mostly White, mostly male world of finance. There are the everyday slights, the racist jokes, the crass stereotypes, the missed opportunities, the stunted careers—all with the gnawing knowledge that almost no one at the very top looks like you. The challenges are particularly formidable for Asian-American women.
‘Model Minority’
But here’s a key difference: On Wall Street, Asian Americans are sometimes stereotyped as a “model minority” because of their economic success as a group. They can also seem like forgotten minorities or, sometimes, not even minorities at all. “Honorary whites” is one term. That is particularly so next to their Black and Latinx colleagues, who are statistically even less represented in upper management and, to some Asian Americans, appear to be the main focus of belated efforts on diversity and inclusion.
Granted, the catchall “Asian American,” coined in the 1960s as a phrase of empowerment, is overly broad. The roughly 5.9% of Americans who identify as people of Asian ancestry aren’t a monolithic group. They comprise a multitude of ethnic groups and cultures, as well as stark economic realities: Asian Americans, often viewed in elite circles as more advantaged than disadvantaged, have the largest income inequality within any racial community in the U.S.
On Wall Street, the presence of highly educated, well-paid Asian Americans can mask the issues of racism and economic disparities that exist in broader society.
Speaking Out
Interviews with more than 20 Asian Americans working in U.S. finance, in positions ranging from analyst to managing director, suggest this broad, diverse group is now united in its anxiety and fear. Many feel angry. Others betrayed or overlooked. More and more are speaking out.
“We need to break the silence,” Chang wrote in a March 26 internal blog post at JPMorgan Chase & Co., where she is chair of global research. She urged her colleagues to talk about the contradictory stereotypes of Asian Americans being perceived as a group to be feared at the same time as being labeled “silent, invisible achievers.”
At the heart of this story are numbers. The fact is, Asian Americans make up a greater percentage of finance workers than Black or Latinx people. The total workforces of the six biggest U.S. banks average 15.5% Asian American, 15% Hispanic or Latino, and 10.3% African American.
Yet at a time when Kamala Harris became the first Indian American and Black person to be elected vice president, and Andrew Yang, a son of Taiwanese immigrants, is running for mayor of New York, no Asian American runs a top five U.S. bank. Among companies in the S&P 500, fewer than 1% of all CEOs in recent years have been of East Asian descent.
Across the six largest U.S. lenders, the proportion of Asian Americans in executive or senior management roles ranges from 7% to almost 19%, even though they comprise an average 23% of middle managers and professionals. Greater strides have been made in areas like private equity: the head of Carlyle Group Inc., Kewsong Lee, is Korean American, as is KKR & Co. Co-President Joe Bae.