They Never Say It To Your Face

Were there instances where you felt people were at times biased toward you because you were a woman or Asian or perhaps both? And how did you deal with that?

I think one of the challenges and the deepest challenge is they never say to your face, you're not getting promoted because you're a woman. But if you look at the statistics, women do not make it to the first wrung of management. They get promoted slower and they're more overlooked for, women are, for example, promoted on performance and men are promoted on potential. And so it's not obvious, right? It's not that they say, well, it's because you're Asian. But if you look at the rate of Asians and Asian women promotions, it's lower than everybody else. So either Asian women are incompetent and can't do the job or there's bias in the system. But it's not like any individual person looks you in the eye and says, as an Asian woman, you are not qualified for this job.

Yeah.

And that's what's really insidious is it's hard. If it's overt discrimination then you know, but when it's not, when it's hidden, you're asking yourself, well maybe I'm not good enough. What did I do wrong? And you internalize that. And I do think that is one of the biggest challenges that we have, which is that if you actually look at unconscious bias and how it plays out in technology and other company is it's hidden and nobody actually is telling you, and nobody is actually kind of giving you the full picture. And that's really hard.