More Asian American Women Leaders
September 28, 2000
A few weeks ago I wrote about the women who are leading advocacy organizations here in Washington, D.C. After the article was published, several folks wrote to ask why other prominent women were not included. For example, Rose Ochi heads the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, Jeannette Takamura serves as assistant secretary for aging at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Donna Tanoue serves as chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Each of these women supervises hundreds of staff and oversees budgets many zeroes large. They have the power to change important functions that are served by our federal government. And they are bringing female and Asian American sensibilities to their jobs, even though their function has no gender or racial requirement.
I focused on executive directors of Asian American community advocacy groups because contradictions must be overcome in order for an Asian American woman to take these roles. In a society that presumes white advantaged males are competent, those with other characteristics must prove their fitness for the job against a presumption of incompetence. Men are assumed leaders. Women are not. Asian Americans in leadership roles must battle against stereotypes of foreignness, inarticulateness and lack of assertiveness.
Asian American women, then, must not only do as well as other leaders, they must do better. They must overcome stereotypes, as well as real cultural and family lessons that taught them to stay in the background. They must battle men who are threatened by having a female boss. They must battle other women, who, like crabs in a bucket, hold women leaders back from achieving something that other women have not achieved (for those who saw the last episode of Survivor, notice how the men bonded together to help Rich win, while Sue took out her rage and feelings of inadequacy on Kelly).
One Asian American woman told me that the large number of women leading our community’s nonprofits in part reflects individual leadership skills—and a troubling sign that the API community does not value non-profit work.
An unfortunate reality in this society is that women have always worked but that the family-related aspects of female labor are devalued in three important ways: by not paying for it, by referring to it disparagingly as “housework” or “childcare,” and by not including it as part of economic calculations of the Gross National Product (GNP).
Asian American men still face tremendous family and community pressure to succeed economically, and nonprofits pay very low salaries and almost no retirement benefits. Nonprofit work also involves rolling up your sleeves and doing clerical as well as management functions on a regular basis; unfortunately, not enough Asian American males are being socialized to cheerfully assume this less-glamorous aspect of serving the underprivileged (although a new generation of male college students raised after the feminist revolution of the 1970s is helping to change this).
Being the executive director of a group involves pressures that no one can understand who has not been there. For example, you can ot be buddy-buddy with employees over whom you have the power of firing. To do so is a form of boundary crossing that is as bad as a teacher hanging out socially with students over whom they have the power of a grade.
Asian American women in leadership roles rarely see another face like theirs around the conference table. Many have had to forego families in order to keep up with the demands of their jobs. To be restricted from socializing with co-workers is difficult. More groups like the Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education (for university administrators) are needed so that Asian American leaders can get together and share experiences in a non-threatening environment.
Asian American female CEOs, like male CEOs and those of other backgrounds, must daily address the demands of staff, board, community, the media and funders. Because community groups operate on a shoestring budget and are usually not organized as paradigms of corporate efficiency, situations often arise where budgets, board meeting packets, or annual meetings can dominate the flow of days or weeks. The ebbs and flows—and the constant pressure—can be debilitating for anyone. So, to be a woman and an Asian American on top of that is stressful. My hat is off to all of them, both those mentioned in my last piece and those I missed, who are all doing the job on behalf of the community.
Women moving outside the community to assume important jobs in the corporate or government sectors are also battling great obstacles, and deserve our collective thanks. For example, Yvonne Lee serves as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and Ruby Moy serves as the executive director for the Commission. They are protecting the civil rights of all Americans, not just Asian Americans. Kendee Yamaguchi and Shamina Singh serve as directors of important programs at the White House, while Ginger Lew has served as general counsel at the Commerce Department and now has made the leap to the corporate sector—as CEO of the Telecommunications Development Fund (www.tdfund.com). Other leaders in second tier jobs at powerful institutions are also making a tremendous impact on our community. For example, Gloria Caoile is special assistant to the International President of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), one of the biggest unions in Washington, D.C., and nationally. She is so well respected there that she has helped to convince the AFL-CIO and organized labor to support the Asian American community in a dozen ways. She, personally, and the union, as an institution, have played key roles in the formation of groups such as the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (www.apalnet.org) and the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies (www.apaics.org), which serve our community every day in many ways.
In summary, Asian American women in Washington are making great strides not only in top-tier roles in community-based organizations, but are moving into leadership roles in government and industry as well. With the support of Asian American men and their fellow Asian American women, these leaders will certainly transform the landscape in this male-dominated town in the decades ahead.
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