Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Asian men care about their work and careers, and are important contributors to the technology, education, healthcare sectors (among others). In this section, we'll explore career choices Asian American men have made, factors that enhance career satisfaction, and their workplace experiences.

Demographics of Working-Age Asian Men

Of the 650+ Asian American men we surveyed in 2017, 446 of them were over 24 years old, and this was the group we considered as we looked at various aspects of their work and career. We recognize that this survey is unable to be nationally representative of Asian men, so we always include demographic information about the men who took our survey and whose responses we are analyzing.

• Professional fields: in our survey, the most common professional fields these Asian men worked in were Technology, Education, Healthcare, and Professional Services, which account for more than 60% of the total respondents
• Education: this is a highly educated group (compared to Americans and even Asian Americans nationally) with more than 90% holding a 4 year bachelors degree or higher
• Income: this is also a relatively high-earning group with more than half of respondents earning more than $75k annually
• Managers: while a bit more than half of respondents are individual contributors who don't manage a team, the other 40 percent are supervisors of at least one person, up to a small handful that supervise more than 100 people.

Career Satisfaction

In general, Asian men seemed to be pretty satisfied with their carers. The vast majority of respondents answered between a 3 and a 4 when asked to rate their career satisfaction from 1 (worst) to 5 (best).

Education and Income
​We found that career satisfaction appears to moderately correlate with educational attainment and income. Both income and education are of course interrelated factors as well.

While this may appear to indicate that simply getting a good-paying job for instance is enough to raise career satisfaction, it's more complicated than that. At least part of this phenomenon deals with the fact that more satisfactory jobs require better education and tend to pay more, even if it isn't the pay that drives satisfaction.

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We asked Asian American men what aspects of their career were they most happy about and least happy about. This is a way to think about what respondents like and appreciate about their careers, and what they find frustrating or difficult.

​Career satisfaction is a complex issue with many inputs and people value different aspects differently based on personality and where they are in life. With that in mind, here are some things we learned:

• Fits my strengths and interests: these are the number one and number two factors that people are happy with about their careers and rarely seen as a point of frustration. This suggests that many Asian men feel like they found a career that was personalized to their abilities and curiosities, and that this was important to them. 
• Work-life balance: this appears to be an issue that matters to Asian men, in that when they have it, they value it highly, and when they don't have it, it is something that frustrates them
• Compensation: this was the number one frustration but number four in terms of appreciation. This suggests that when Asian men feel they are not earning enough, it's a big issue, but once they earn adequate pay, their focus moves elsewhere.
• Job security and employability: while many Asian men are taught by their families to choose careers that are in demand and stable, it doesn't seem to be something that they value highly or feel frustrated for lacking

We did a deeper analysis to look at what factors most enhanced the career satisfaction of Asian men. We did this by comparing the average career satisfaction of Asian men who included a particular career attribute (e.g. Prestige) vs Asian men who did not. What we found was fascinating.

• Impact on Society: this was the biggest career satisfaction booster for Asian men, increasing it by 0.61. This is the same increase we see between men earning $20k-34k and men earning $75k-100k or men who only finished some college and men who have a graduate degree. What's interesting is that as a factor, it does not appear at the top of either the Appreciation or Frustration lists.
• Great Colleagues: similar to Impact on Society, this was a middle of the pack factor on both lists yet appears to make nearly the same difference as Impact on Society in terms of boosting career satisfaction
• Prestige: After two "feel-good" factors, it's interesting to then see the #3 career booster being a more basic attribute. It may be that for people who care about Prestige, it makes a very big difference if you do have it versus if you don't.
• Compensation: finally, farther down on the list we have Compensation, which we saw earlier was #1 on the list of career frustrations. It's possible if you were very frustrated by your pay and you got a decent sized raise or new job with a higher pay, you'd increase in satisfaction. But what we see here is people who consider good pay one of the Top 3 things they are most happy about with their job makes half as much of a difference in increasing overall career satisfaction compared to other factors like Impact on Society or Great Colleagues.

Race and the Workplace

Asian American men are aware that society has certain preconceived notions about them that play out in the workplace. It is often difficult to prove that an experience is due to race, but in aggregate this data can help us see what happens often for Asian men. 

• Working hard: More than 80 percent of Asian men have been recognized for working hard. A great quality on its face, this praise can also be interpreted as an expectation that they would put in longer hours or work harder than others for the same pay
• Good at math / science / computers: Around three quarters of Asian men report having been assumed to be good at math, science, or computers either several or many times. While on the face of it a good thing, this overarching belief can be constraining 
• Recognized for technical ability: in relation to the above stated belief, Asian men are often praised or acknowledged for their technical contributions to the workplace
  
• Reduced recognition for creative or leadership ability: compared to technical ability or sheer hard work, Asian men were less likely to be recognized as being creative or having leadership ability

Beyond common experiences that can happen in any work environment (recognition, assumptions, etc) we also asked Asian American men about more explicitly racial comments or events that occurred to them or at their workplace. Here's what we found:

• Guessing your ethnicity: 86% of Asian men have commonly experienced someone trying to guess their ethnic background ("Oh, you must be Filipino/Vietnamese/Thai"). While context is everything, being put on the spot to answer ones heritage is not necessarily something people want to do at work, and likely happens less often to people of other ethnicities.
• Asians and Asian culture is "all the same": 60% - 70% of Asian men have heard several or many comments and experiences at work that imply that Asian people and Asian culture are difficult to tell apart. This could be that be confusing two people who are both Asian or saying that Asian countries were similar or the same.
• Too many Asians: Comments about the excessive number of Asians in a group of people indicate a kind of "invisible quota" for Asians that when surpassed, is a concern. It also suggests being seen as interchangeable parts rather than distinct individuals
  
• Asian names are "hard": We also saw a theme of Asian names being difficult to pronounce and misspelled. This kind of experience can add to a feeling of being "foreigners" while other names and cultures are seen as "native"