UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation examines Asian American tech workers as racialized and intersectional subjects within the high-tech industry. Although STEM fields and occupations are often considered Asian-concentrated domains, Asian immigrant and Asian American workers are rarely studied as workers who are impacted by racial discrimination or have strategies to mitigate potential racism. Through interviews with 59 Asian American tech workers, this research expands on and questions our current theoretical understanding of race, gender, and organizations for Asian American workers. First, I establish the ways in which Asian American tech workers discount anti-Asian discriminations in the workplace and offer a new theoretical framework, racial strategies, to understand how they mitigate or address racism. I find that Asian American tech workers employ four racial strategies to deflect or confront racism in the workplace. Three of the strategies: racial maneuvering, essentializing, and distancing intentionally discount the role of race and racism within Asian Americans’ professional lives. A fourth racial strategy, dissenting, acknowledges racism, but those who use this strategy are often so frustrated by the white-dominated racial organizations they work for that they leave mainstream organizations altogether. Next, I ask how competing gender and racial identities among Asian American women are realized in tech culture. I find that academic institutions, recruitment processes, and professional diversity initiatives reinforce the rhetoric that gender inequality is the highest priority inequality to address and that is the most directly relevant inequality to Asian American women tech workers’ experiences. Racial inequality, on the other hand, is an inequality reserved for “other” racial minorities and does not, for the most part, affect the professional careers of Asian American tech workers. As a result, Asian American women develop a strong gender and a weak racial identity. In the last empirical chapter, I explore Asian American tech workers’ boundaries for racial group membership and its perceived benefits. I demonstrate that Asian Americans are active participants in their group-making process, that they apply strict requirements to prevent Asian immigrant workers from receiving membership, and that they police the behaviors of other Asian American tech workers in order to remain in good racial standing within high-tech organizations. These intentional choices reinforce racial stereotypes of Asian American as “honorary whites” and Model Minorities by ensuring their behaviors align with stereotypical work ethic and technical competencies. By studying and theorizing about Asian Americans as racial subjects in occupations, I demonstrate how an upwardly mobile and “successful” racial minority is nevertheless shaped by racism.