On Tuesday the Trump Administration moved to scrap Obama-era policies urging universities to weigh race as a factor in admissions. In making the change, Trump officials are wading into a pitched battle over affirmative action, centered around a high-profile lawsuit against Harvard University. Last month the institution was forced to make public court documents that a group of Asian-American plaintiffs claim to show a pattern of racial discrimination by Harvard administrators. Analyzing the university’s admission data on 160,000 students, the New York Times found that Asian-American applicants consistently scored lower on assessments of personality, which includes characteristics like “likability” and being “widely respected.”

Traits like these—resting on the subjective perceptions of those in positions of authority—have long been fraught terrain for historically marginalized groups in American public life, and not just in higher education but in the workplace, too. Women, for example, still find themselves caught in a trade-off between being well-liked and exercising authority; many find that it’s hard to do both simultaneously.

But Asian-Americans’ experiences navigating institutional power are unique for a few reasons. First, there’s the vast diversity of cultures, histories, and socioeconomic conditions among Asian-Americans themselves—differences that aren’t always reflected in popular discourse. Large waves of Chinese immigrants in the 19th century met widespread discrimination and race-based violence, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, while Japanese-Americans suffered deportation and mass internment during the 1940s. Both of these periods are typically taught in American classrooms, but more recent facets of the Asian-American experience may not be. The past half-century has seen a swell in immigration from other Asian countries, like the Philippines and India, but data tells us that most Americans are still more likely to point to someone of East Asian descent when asked to identify an Asian-American.

Then there’s the range of perspectives among Asian-Americans on the matter currently under legal dispute. Chinese-Americans increasingly oppose affirmative action, while other Asian-American groups, including Indian-Americans and Filipino-Americans, are far more supportive of those policies.

Finally, as Asian women, we know firsthand that popular stereotypes and biases Asian-Americans face tend to get filtered through the additional lenses of gender, religion, skin color, and more. Yet we know, too, that even the most damaging stereotypes can deliver strategic and material advantages, however limited. For example, the “model minority” myth, which casts Asians as smart and hardworking if not necessarily as bold, creative, and extroverted, may underlie the overrepresentation of Asian-American men in the tech sector—except in its leadership ranks.

Double binds like these can make intersecting issues of identity difficult to talk about openly. When we asked 17 Asian-American business leaders to share their experiences navigating such “personality” paradoxes in the modern workplace, roughly half declined to speak on the record. (Most who demurred were women, a number of whom were more comfortable discussing gender biases than racial ones.) Here’s what a few of them shared with us. The following conversations have been lightly edited for length and clarity.