Asian Americans in Computer Science

When I logged on to Zoom on my first day of Flatiron School software engineering bootcamp, I remember looking at the grid of faces displayed on the screen and being amazed by the diversity I saw. As an Asian American woman in the tech field, which is historically dominated by white men, I was happy to see so many people working towards breaking the glass ceiling, helping to open STEM fields to women and people of color.

When we think of famous computer scientists and programmers, the list of most known names is typically dominated by white males like Allan Turing, Larry Page, and Ken Thompson. Not as many people would think of Asian names, like Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!, Steve Chen, co-founder and first CTO of Youtube, and Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code. Interestingly, despite the fact that few Asians computer-scientists or programmers are household names, Asians are often over-represented in STEM fields compared to other minorities. A racial breakdown of Stanford computer science majors done by Stanford Daily in 2020 saw that 36.9% of the students were of east Asian origin, and another 14.2% were South Asian, more than the number of white students who made up 33.6% of the class.

At the same time, women are almost always under-represented in CS, and the same Stanford study mentioned above found that women only made up 34.4% of CS majors at Stanford in 2020. This puts Asian American women in the position of both being over-represented as Asians in technical fields and under-represented as women. Because of this, Asian women have a unique advantage when it comes to breaking glass ceilings and helping get minority recognition in traditionally white male dominated technical fields like software engineering and creating a more diverse future.

By using their unique position with regards to racial and gender representation, Asian women in technical fields can help make a difference in minority recognition and representation in these fields. By helping to break glass ceilings, hopefully we can make tech a more diverse field in the future.

Bibliography:

1. Andrews, Sophie, and Lucia Morris. “Diversity in CS: Race and Gender among CS Majors in 2015 vs 2020.” The Stanford Daily, 9 Aug. 2020, www.stanforddaily.com/2020/08/08/how-has-diversity-within-stanfords-cs-department-changed-over-the-past-5-years/.