Jacson Lu, from MIT Sloan, will present "The Bamboo Ceiling in US Business Schools: Who Receives Tenure and Becomes Dean?"

In the US, Asians are commonly viewed as the “model minority” in business academia. Some inspiring initiatives intended to help ethnic minorities to attain tenure and deanship exclude Asians from participating, perhaps because Asians are assumed to be already successful. I challenge this assumption by revealing a “Bamboo Ceiling” in tenure, full professorship, and deanship in US business schools. I analyze a 10-year panel of tenure-track professors and deans at top-50 US business schools. Although Asians appear well represented at first glance, a stark contrast emerges once I distinguish between East Asians (e.g., ethnic Chinese) and South Asians (e.g., ethnic Indians): Among all ethnicities, East Asian faculty are proportionally the least likely to be tenured professors, full professors, and deans, whereas South Asian faculty are the most likely. Moreover, East Asians tend to be employed by lower-ranked schools. To understand these puzzling patterns, I construct large-scale datasets to test potential contributing factors, including (a) faculty recruitment bar, (b) research productivity, (c) research impact, (d) teaching evaluations, (e) invited seminar talks, (f) social media activities, and (g) social media mentions. As one of the largest endeavors to examine ethnic disparities in academia, this research extends the diversity, equity, and inclusion literature and the “leaky pipeline” literature by uncovering East Asian faculty’s neglected challenges in US business schools.