Asians in Science, Asians Online
In the mix of the whole “Scienceblogs is white!!” non-event, Razib at Gene Expression had some questions to ask about the underrepresentation of Asians in blogging, even though Asians tend to be over-represented in science research. He speculates that maybe Asian American cultures tend not to cultivate literary talents as much.
I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate some more. I think Asian Americans tend to emphasize mathematical and technical fields because of social and migratory selection.
Namely, the over-representation of Asians in certain fields has to do with the immigrant language barrier. It’s hard to get a job if you don’t speak English well; part of being successful in the humanities is being able to communicate, as that’s largely what one does in those fields: communicate and analyze other people’s communications. On the other hand, technical fields, especially highly mathematical fields, tend to translate better across language barriers because mathematics is universal these days. Those immigrants who are able to obtain green cards or visas are those who have valuable skills that can translate immediately to results, and those skills tend to be technical.
You’d think that it would still be hard to survive any academic job without a good command of English, but immigrants can be amazingly resourceful, and academia can be surprisingly forgiving of bad speaking ability (let’s face it, professors are often not model speakers, even the native English speakers). I know that my dad had an insane amount of trouble learning english, but his mathematical ability was top-notch. He survived his thesis defense by writing down his entire presentation beforehand and memorizing it, word-for-word.
So what I’m saying is that the American barriers and limitations to immigration create an artificial, societal selection such that only those immigrants with technical abilities are able to pass through the immigration filter with any amount of ease.
This model, of course, makes some predictions. As English language teaching abroad increases, more immigrants and more minorities with backgrounds from those countries should start to appear in the humanities. In addition, this kind of filter effect should happen even with non-Asian ethnic groups, as long as there is some sort of language barrier. I’m curious as to how many British scholars, for example, populate the humanities compared to, say, German speakers (I’m trying to pick countries that have roughly the same overall economic status, and similar “white”-ness and cultural backgrounds). More Africans and Hispanics should populate the sciences compared to other disciplines, too.
The main problem with generalizing this model to other immigrant and minority groups is that there are fewer scholars that are, say, black, or Hispanic in academia, compared to Asians. There might be too much noise to definitively affirm or rule out this “filter effect” in such groups. There might be enough immigration, however, from Britain and Europe to do some sort of preliminary analysis.
