Wen-Chu Chen,Shirley Hune "Gains and Leaks in The Pipeline" By: Christopher Aba

          Does the intersection of race and gender play a role in the advancement of higher education? In my opinion yes, it does.

          The pipeline is a metaphor in academe to describe the progression of students, who serve as the talent pool into faculty positions. Basically what this means is, the pipeline is the students in academe who go into teaching positions. If that’s the pipeline, then leaks in the pipeline or the leaky pipeline means the loss of talent that occurs when individuals fail to advance or leave higher education for whatever reason.

          It is true that AAPI women, being both female and a radicalized group, affect their status and advancement or lack of such in higher education.

          I think it’s ironic that even though AAPI women are becoming better educated than their male counterparts, and make up fifty five percent of the graduates; you see them less as you progress in the pipeline. Also considering the fact that they outnumber the males in bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral, and professional degrees wouldn’t it be safe to assume that AAPI women, therefore represent a highly qualified pool to be recruited into potentially higher positions?

          I think the reason why they are underrepresented as a minority and this fact is overlooked, is because they are not considered in discussions on racial barriers. Another reason why this is overlooked is that they are thrown into a group as a whole (APAs) rather than smaller specific groups with specific needs.

          AAPI women have to deal with many barriers in advancing in their specific fields of study. Some of these include: Stereotyping, language, indifferent colleagues, the white male norms, and also splitting the demands of work and family. Because there are both racial and gender barriers these lead to the “leaks in the pipeline”. Discrimination and cultural family components cause these leaks as well.

          I mean even in this article they had statistics to show the ratio of AAPI women and AAPI men in different degrees, and the corresponding job positions. The bar graphs show that AAPI women outnumber the men in receiving the degrees and are more educated. However the graphs also show that at each level the men increasingly outnumber the women in the job positions.

So what is the cause for these leaks in the pipeline?

          Some of the women drop out because of the demands of mother hood and how the family demands fall solely on the woman. But even so that doesn’t mean they can’t return to their positions. I think that these leaks are caused directly by the white male environment, and how it alienated the AAPI faculty. This atmosphere is described as the, “Chilly Climate”.

          What’s interesting is that the gender discrepancy for AAPI’s continues to grow as the faculty increases for men. We end up seeing that for men the numbers remain constant in all levels of the pipeline, except it’s not till presidency that there is very little representation. For women they do pretty well getting the first level position as assistant professors, but their representation dramatically drops thereafter.

          AAPI males and females both have their challenges, but for the males it’s further down the pipeline. For females it’s not just race that matters, but gender too.

          The integration of racial and gender stereotyping is not only a problem from colleagues being indifferent, but also the students. These students give little respect to their female professors, and this leads to feelings of isolation and marginalization within these departments by faculty and students.

          This really shows that race and gender are both factors, and in my opinion there should be diversified faculty so that they can help ease the hurdles for incoming AAPI female faculty members.