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Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Asian American Men Face Discrimination in Job Market



Source: American Sociological Association (ASA)

Research Exposes Racial Discrimination Against Asian American Men in Job Market

Newswise — A new study by a University of Kansas sociologist shows that U.S. employers fail to pay Asian American men as much as similarly qualified white men.

“The most striking result is that native-born Asian Americans — who were born in the U.S. and speak English perfectly — their income is 8 percent lower than whites after controlling for their college majors, their places of residence and their level of education,” said ChangHwan Kim, an assistant professor of sociology at KU, who led the study.

Full results of the study — “Have Asian American Men Achieved Labor Market Parity with White Men?” — appear in the December issue of the American Sociological Review.

According to Kim, who co-authored the study with Arthur Sakamoto of the University of Texas at Austin, the findings show that the U.S. falls short of the goal of a colorblind society.

“As an individual, you can reach as high as president,” said Kim. “But as an ethnic group, no group has reached full parity with whites. That’s the current status of racial equality in the United States.”

Kim and Sakamoto combed data from the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates to investigate earnings — numbers that have not been used previously in research on Asian Americans.

Among their other notable findings:

- First-generation Asian American men, who were born and completed their education overseas, earn 29 percent less than white men in the U.S.

- 1.25-generation Asian American men, those who earned their highest degree at a U.S. institution, but were born and previously educated in a foreign country, had incomes 14 percent lower than those of white men.

- The only group to have achieved earnings parity with white men is 1.5-generation Asian American men. Though foreign-born, these men came to the U.S. as children, so therefore speak perfect English and have U.S. educations.

Kim said that 1.5-generation Asian American men could benefit economically from their parents’ immigrant work ethic: “They see their parents struggle, and they understand that their achievement in the United States is actually their parents’ achievement. It’s not their own goal, it’s the goal for their whole family,” he said. “They actually have a burden of success.”

Despite the disparity in income levels, Asian American men are less disadvantaged than before the Civil Rights era in the U.S. Advancement towards an end to racial discrimination continues, according to Kim.

“The 8 percent difference is large, but it is small compared to previous Asian American generations,” Kim said. “Previous generations had income levels much lower, so in this sense we’ve made progress.”

About the American Sociological Association and the American Sociological Review
The American Sociological Association (www.asanet.org), founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society. The American Sociological Review is the ASA’s flagship journal.

The research article described above is available by request for members of the media. For a copy of the full study, contact Daniel Fowler, ASA’s Media Relations and Public Affairs Officer, at (202) 527-7885 or pubinfo@asanet.org.

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Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Google Misses You



Facebook has corralled 500 million people into an exclusive club that's out of Google's reach. There's no way Google will stand for that.
  • Technology Review By Paul Boutin
Credit: Peter Arkle
  
Last winter, Google made a run at Facebook and fell flat, fast. Google Buzz, the social network it tried to build around its popular Gmail service, failed to live up to its name: it drew only a small fraction of Gmail's more than 100 million users, and it prompted a privacy scare and a lawsuit.

But Google didn't give up. Instead, the company is trying again, on a much bigger scale. It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying Web companies and luring talent in hopes of stopping, or at least slowing, Facebook's dominance in online social networking. (The project has been dubbed "Google Me," according to people in Silicon Valley who claim inside knowledge.)

Why would Google--the Web's most profitable public company, an organization that has had no difficulty increasing its commissions from online advertising--have it in for Facebook?

It's this simple: Facebook, from the start, has locked Google's Web-crawling robots away from its exclusive club of 500 million members. Just try to search for yourself or anyone else who you know is on Facebook. Google probably won't deliver more than a skimpy profile page whose goal seems to be to get you intrigued enough to sign up for Facebook yourself.

Facebook lets members reconfigure their accounts to open their photos and personal information to Google, but it prevents search engines from indexing individual status updates, the site's core content.