Um. Of course not. This would seem a strange question to, say, the 1.2 billion people in China whose economy enjoys more than 10% annual growth and a $250 billion trade surplus with the U.S., on the strength of home-grown leadership.

But in the U.S., there’s a terrible dearth of Asian-American leaders. Asian-Americans are a breathtakingly educated group, and account for 5 percent of the U.S. population, yet only .3 percent of corporate officers are Asian-American. The question is why.

One new study out of UC Riverside hazards an answer: bias against Asian-Americans’ leadership potential.

Researchers gave a group of businesspeople identical information about a fictional employee, and asked them to assess the person’s leadership ability. In some cases they were told that the employee was Asian-American and in other cases that he was Caucasian-American. The Caucasian-Americans were consistently ranked higher.

“In the Western world, the ideal leadership prototype is charismatic,” explained Thomas Sy, lead author of the study. Asians, in contrast, are believed to have traits such as “social introversion,” “verbal inhibition,” “a quiet demeanor,” and a “reserved manner.”

Of course, all of this can sound like a grand exercise in cultural stereotyping; it’s simply not true that all Asian-Americans are introverts or socially reserved. Also, levels of reserve tend to vary depending on country of origin and number of generations spent in the U.S. But even if all Asian-Americans were introverted, the idea that quiet people can’t make good leaders is sheer nonsense. Recent research documents the strengths that introverts bring to leadership — and the limits of charisma. (I’ll post more about this research in future.)

It also seems to ignore examples of effective Asian-American leaders: people like Andrea Jung, CEO of Avon (who, incidentally, described herself as “reserved” in a USA Today article called “Not all Successful CEOs are Extroverts“), pictured above. Outside the business world, there’s David Ho, pioneering AIDS researcher; novelist Chang Rae-Lee; film director Ang Lee; fashion designer Vera Wang; New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani…the list goes on and on.

But facts are nothing compared to perceptions.

How many capable people are held back unfairly as a result of this bias? “We’ve been taught that if you have greater education, skill and experience, you will succeed,” Thomas Sy said. “That falls apart when it comes to Asian-Americans.”

I also wonder whether we might eventually see a brain drain of talented Asian-American leaders. One well-heeled housewife I interviewed in Cupertino, California confided that many of the husbands in her Chinese-American social circle had recently accepted jobs in China. They were now “commuting” between Cupertino and Shanghai, partly because their quiet styles prevented them from advancing locally.

The American companies “think they can’t handle business,” she said, “because of presentation. In business, you have to put a lot of nonsense together and present it. My husband always just makes his point and that’s the end of it. When you look at big companies, almost none of the top executives are Asians. They hire someone who doesn’t know anything about the business, but maybe he can make a good presentation.”

What about you? Have you observed this bias in your workplace? Any ideas for how to correct it? If you’re Asian-American and have a quiet personality, are you interested in leadership, and does it seem attainable?

