- In 2020, COVID-19,
coined the Chinese virus by then president Donald Trump,
ignited a rise in Asian hate crimes.
There were nearly 3,800 incidences reported
over the course of a year during the pandemic
with 68% of those aimed towards women.
And over 11% of all incidents involve violent attacks
including the tragic March 16th shootings in Atlanta.
The recent wave of anti-Asian discrimination
reminds us all of the ugly racism
the Asian community has faced throughout America's history.
America's first immigration law, The Page Act of 1875,
made East Asian women's immigration illegal
and barred existing Chinese-American women
from becoming citizens
for fear of temptations for white men.
It wasn't until 1943 that those laws were repealed
roughly coinciding with President Roosevelt
establishing Japanese-American internment camps
during World War II.
And in the 1980s, the model minority stereotype of Asians
was used to place blame on the black community
for failing to escape systemic poverty.
As America slowly realizes its need
to address white supremacy and systemic racism,
Asians and Asian-Americans
are often left out of the conversation.
And even though President Biden
vowed to be a president for all Americans
in his inaugural address,
a lot of hard work and uncomfortable conversations
need to happen in order for America
to truly be equitable for all.
(bouncy music)
Creating real systemic change is a continuous journey
that requires us to always keep taking steps forward,
no matter how big or how small.
This is The Work in Progress.
According to the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center
from March through December of 2020,
8% of Asian hate incidents involved workplace discrimination
or refusal of service.
I spoke to Emily Chang, CEO of China, McCann Worldgroup
about her experiences navigating her career
and what we can do to make things better for the future.
What sorts of experiences have you had, you know
just climbing the career ladder
as an Asian and as a woman like
and how has that played out in your journey?
- Yeah, I do think there are
some particularly unique challenges.
If I look at the way that I grew up,
I grew up in a very Chinese household.
Let me, let me pick discipline as an example.
My parents were super disciplined,
so I played three instruments, piano, violin, and flute.
I had to practice each instrument one hour a day.
So that's three hours after school.
And what I'll say is to answer your question,
when you get to the workplace,
that's how you've been trained.
That's not what the workplace is like.
Nobody is polishing their memos, you know, all night long.
They're kind of putting the core idea out
and sending it out there,
in the spirit of collaboration, looking for feedback.
I was sitting there getting things perfect.
And it took me a couple of years
as an Asian in the workplace to say,
I can let go of some of that discipline
or I'm gonna kill myself.
And then if I go to the other piece, which is as a woman,
I would say, yeah, there are unique challenges there too.
Let's not pretend there aren't.
I think generally if you see a woman in a suit
get off of a bus to go to a storage hack
or to go visit a hotel with eight men,
there are assumptions made.
They're not necessarily malicious
but do I get handed things?
Yes, I do.
I get handed men's blazers.
I get handed the agenda for the day.
I get ended coffee orders.
But I'll also say I don't take it personally
and I don't get offended,
because I don't think people are trying to be mean.
I think this is what representation is about.
If we are generally the sum of the inputs that we take in,
we have to be really careful about what we're taking in.
But what does media tell us,
even when we're not being as intentional,
we're just watching something because it's fun.
Well, if there's a group and there's one woman,
probably, sometimes, more often than not,
she's the admin or she's the secretary.
So I think we need to actively fight that misrepresentation
by creating different narratives,
different visuals that people's brains can then assimilate.
I think it's also important for us on the receiving end
to not respond angrily or defensively.
I think there's an opportunity to gently correct.
We can help people save face, 'cause by the way
we're gonna be working with them.
So humiliating them or angering them back
is not gonna help anybody.
I think that's super important,
whether we are questioning the way our minds
are receiving the information we're seeing.
And we should probably ask ourselves,
let's not assume she's the secretary.
Or we're on the receiving end
and we're being handed people's stuff.
We can respond generously and say, how do I rise above this
and recognize that this is due to an assimilation
of things that people have seen
and use this as a teachable moment.
- I think about, you know, generosity in sort of
what most people look at as a battle, right?
Like the first sign of offense,
I'm gonna have to like correct you and humiliate you
and do all these things that sort of naturally bubble up.
And I think the generosity part
and the conscious part of it says like, okay,
let me use this as a teachable opportunity
in a way that's kind and maybe non-confrontational.
How have you found that to play out on a day-to-day basis
or, you know, in your own personal journey
with sort of educating people in a moment?
- Well, I think of a personal example
'cause my daughter is interested to go to the states
having mostly grown up in China.
We were there in the middle
of what the president of the country
referred to as the Kung Flu,
which gave her a very different sort of childhood glimpse
of America that I had when I was, when I was little.
And I, one day I was walking down the street in Seattle
with my daughter
and somebody, we were speaking in Chinese
and somebody across the street shouted,
take your blankety Kung Flu back to where you came from.
And my daughter looked at me like, what is he talking about?
And you kind of pause.
And again, like I was thinking first pause, always pause.
And then what is the right reaction here?
We can, my first reaction is to protect my kid
is to put her on the other side of the street
and just keep walking.
But what is that teaching her, right?
How are we being intentional in this moment
to extract the maximum value for everybody involved?
I called back out across the street.
I said, sir, is there something we've done to offend you?
And he said, Oh no, you're one of us, you're cool.
And then again, okay, is that a good conclusion?
Should I walk on?
Or is there more that we should do?
So I thought, you know I'm probably not gonna teach him,
I'm not going to change this grownup.
But maybe he'll think again
before he says something again to a stranger
and definitely my daughter will understand
how we represent ourselves.
So I kind of said back to him, I said,
well, I'm glad you don't have a problem with us,
but maybe, you know, it's worth
just getting to know somebody a little more
before you you assume where they're coming from.
And I kind of, you know,
kind of said it quietly and gently with a smile.
And he said, yeah, you're right.
And then he walked on.
And it could have ended a number of different ways.
So sometimes you have to be a little brave and say
I'm gonna go see where this takes me.
But I do feel like it left an impression with my kid.
And maybe, you know, hopefully
it left a little bit of an impression with him.
- Asian-Americans are the fastest growing racial
or ethnic minority group in the United States
according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.
Between the years, 2000 and 2019,
the Asian population grew 81%
compared to 70% among Hispanic-Americans
and just 20% among black Americans.
And the purchasing power of Asian-Americans
is expected to be $1.3 trillion by 2023,
according to Nielsen.
Peter Pham, co-founder and partner at Science, Inc.
a venture capital firm and startup incubator
knows firsthand how important diversity is
when it comes to business.
From a VC perspective, how has science, you know,
attacked the issues of diversity and equality
in the founder community?
- I like to say we have receipts.
So of our $75 million fund that we've already deployed,
65% of those dollars went to founders of women,
people of color and minorities.
So we do it by putting our money where our mouth is.
For myself, a lot of empathy of where I grew up.
I grew up in LA in a neighborhood
that was mostly Hispanic actually.
I stood out.
But throughout my life, of course,
whether it's elementary school
through high school and college,
there's always these moments where it's clear
that I'm the odd man out of the group.
I see it, unfortunately for sure, for black founders,
women founders, investors.
And I definitely make the effort to help them actually,
as much as I see it.
- How did not seeing other Asians as you were coming up
affect your perspective on the business and the industry?
- Motivating.
I think, you know, when I, one of my first startups
was 15 years ago, Photo Bucket, I'm raising money for that.
And didn't really know any investors
and Gus Tai from Trinity Ventures was our lead investor,
one of the only Asians that I knew back then.
He actually funded my second startup, Bill Shrink,
both companies we sold, made the firm money.
And I think for me, it's motivating, right,
to show that, hey, like we can do this too.
And you know, seeing others out there successful
and having, you know, obviously representation
both for women but also for Asians, for myself,
somebody looking up to, it's inspiring.
You know, we're always trying to, I think it comes
goes all the way back, right?
We're always trying to be win.
We always got to get the straight A's.
And seeing others succeed is just amazing.
- I love the fact that you said, you know,
not seeing others like you was motivating
and you took it not from a place of anger,
which I think anger is also a correct response,
but more from a place of like, ooh
if I can do this, you know,
imagine what the possibilities are,
you know, for others like me
and/or just for your own success.
Tell me a little bit about that sort of perspective.
And if that even resonates with you.
- 100%, I think there's this ideology, you know
you are what you think you can become.
Growing up as a kid, you recognize it.
Well, all the Asians I know, my parents know,
they're all doctors
so I guess we're supposed to be doctors.
And so I think careers and things
whether you're a astronauts, right, or a doctor
or a tech executive, or investors, seeing people like you
you know, as a child and growing up, it's inspiring.
Like you are the average of your friends.
And if your friends are all look like you
and all of your friends do one thing
that's kind of what you become.
I think we're all kind of ingrained and use to that.
For me, watching other Asians succeed,
and there's a circle of tech Asians that we talk and say
you know, I'm so glad there's an Asian in there.
I look at the tech CEOs and startups today, right?
There's we have Eric Wu from Opendoor,
Eric Yuan from Zoom.
You have, let's see Tony Xu from Door Dash.
James Park from Fitbit.
There's a few, there's very, very few
that are still leading companies.
You have Katrina at Stitch Fix,
who just stepped down from being CEO of Stitch Fix.
You have Debbie Soo from Open Table.
That's the list, you know, it's not an extensive list.
And so I'm always looking and rooting for
seeing some of those successes.
- I wonder, I mean, when you mentioned like
sort of how your own sort of support has gone
in large part to some degree
to black founders and women founders, you know,
in the light of recent Asian hate,
how have some of your learnings from helping others
been applied to what we're experiencing now
with Asian hate crimes?
- Having and seeing the violence?
It hits home, right.
Like there, I've been beat up, I got fights
and scraps younger because I'm Asian.
I've been there.
I've been called the names and stood up for my friends
and, you know, got in trouble for these things.
And I think that it's nice to see the allies.
I think we talk about this all the time
in the founders, my black founders
and my investors that I have, like being an ally.
I think Asian-Americans never felt like we had that.
We never asked.
I think there's always this.
We never asked for the help, right?
This is part of the culture.
But to have allies out there saying, look,
you know, we'll stand up for you and we will help.
And you know, that is wrong.
That's nice to see.
And the impact, I think it's real.
I'm very hopeful that we all kind of recognize
that it's always been there.
But I think as Asians, we've never really made the noise.
Right, we just, I think it's part of our culture
to just kinda just be quiet and sit back
and, you know, don't complain, just do the thing.
But it's not about complaining.
It's about demanding, right, respect
and really whether it's your career,
this is asking for the spot that you deserve to be in
as you earn it.
And for those around Asian hate,
it's kind of important to see that it impacts all of us.
- In light of that, like how often do you
support your founders in like the emotional intelligence,
especially, for the diverse groups, right.
Like we do sort of tend to accept what's given to us
and not necessarily like command or demand
what we think we're worth.
And it is rooted in some sort of history
and how you were raised and, you know, cultural traditions
and things like that.
But there's an undoing that happens along the way.
Is there any sort of soft coaching that goes into
the founders that you work with?
- Example is putting people on the heels a bit
and recognizing that, you know, for my startups
that they're raising capital, for example.
Asking the investor, have you invested,
how many women have you invested?
How many black founders have you invested?
How many, what is the diversity of the firm
or where your dollars are put?
And it's not, it's just to level set, remind people that
hey, I should think about this more
in the context of things.
So I would say having most of my founders
who have lots of diversity
is just be a little bit more aggressive
in reminding people
that they're probably not recognizing
that their homogeneous network investment
portfolio patterns are there
and that they should be a little bit more open-minded
and give, you know, these founders a little bit
more of a chance to explain themselves.
But I think it's important to give the opportunity
and a little bit of patience
because of that network isn't really there
to help a lot of folks along the way
that they just didn't know.
- And patience is exactly what it's going to take,
rectifying centuries of injustices
isn't gonna happen overnight.
Now I'm so glad to have you both here at the same time.
Corporate America, the startup ecosystem,
two amazing minds gathered in one space.
Both of you spoke on this in terms of being younger Asians
in America at some point
and this idea of perfection
and some of the things that come up
as sort of cultural touchpoints
that you have in the back of your mind as you operate.
How do you advise younger generations
that are kind of falling into the same career path
and/or pattern?
- Asians on television, right Asians in movies,
all of these things, it's great.
I think our generation and the next is gonna benefit
from seeing more exposure.
I think both blacks, women, Asians,
we're all having the moments for however we stand
in terms of the things that we've been insidiously
been pushed against.
I'm really optimistic that all these things
are coming to an end someday.
- Emily, same question.
- I think speak up.
I do think the younger people today
are in a very different context
than we were when we were young.
So that helps.
And sometimes you don't know still
when to speak up, when to ask questions.
So find a mentor.
I mean, I'm just being really practical here.
Find somebody you can ask questions to
that are not in a position to judge you or evaluate you
in a workplace environment.
Somebody you can say, is this appropriate?
Is it okay to ask about this?
Is it okay to push back on this?
And sometimes it is and sometimes, you know,
you might hear the advice it's better not to for now.
I think be intentional.
Embrace diversity as a theory, not a number.
Diversity is not about not seeing differences
or not recognizing differences.
It's not about equality.
It's about equity, right?
So how can we each move with intention
knowing I've been hired into this job
because of who I am.
Not, how do I fit into this corporate culture
and become more like them?
There's this quote Singleton and I talk about
which is diversity is being invited to the dance,
inclusion is being asked to dance
and belonging is feeling like you can dance
like no one's watching.
And I think our jobs as leaders
and as people who are either supporting, working alongside
or as young Asians, how do we feel that we can dance
like no one's watching?
And that it's only when everyone is dancing
that we know we've been successful.
- I think allyship, especially between and among
multiple groups of minorities and marginalized people
is super, super important, you know,
to be part of the same fight and be in it together
and realize, like your journey is similar to mine.
It may not be exactly the same,
but we are headed in the same direction
is super, super important.
And it's an important part of the puzzle.
I think the way that Emily approached
her own personal experiences with racism
is very smart and different and empowering.
I think if we all sort of took that pause
and a moment to say, like, how can I educate
and use this as a teachable moment
versus, you know maybe the knee jerk reaction
of getting angry, which is also correct,
you could see a lot more progress and results in society.