Asian Americans: The Forgotten Minority in Ecology

Abstract

Many recent articles have focused on the lack of diversity in ecology and environmental fields (Beck et al. 2014, Cid andBowser 2015).These articles have effectively identified the alarming underrepresentation of racial minorities in ecology, in comparison with both the population of the United States and other scientific fields.In these studies and their analyses, Asian Americans are explicitly omitted from the discussion, as they are generally not considered to be underrepresented in the sciences.However, data suggest a significant underrepresentation of Asian Americans in the field of ecology.In 2018, Asian Americans were 5.6% of the U.S. population but earned only 3.0% of ecology Ph.Ds (Fig. 1).A 2010 study on faculty diversity across environmental disciplines found that Asians were only 2.2% of ecology faculty relative to 4.8% of the U.S. population (Taylor 2010).In addition to being generally underrepresented, Asian Americans are markedly absent from leadership positions in ecology.In the most recent Women and Minorities in Ecology report by the Ecological Society of America (ESA), Asians were 4.2% of ESA members, 2.7% of ESA committee members, and 0% of ESA committee chairs (Ortega et al. 2006).This decreasing trend displays an inability of Asians to reach leadership positions.In a 2014 study of diversity in environmental organizations, Asians occupied 1.9% of leadership positions and 0.9% of board member positions at conservation organizations relative to 5.2% of the U.S. population (Taylor 2014).Furthermore, Asian women face the starkest gender disparity among all racial groups in environmental disciplines in academia, with Asian men holding twice as many faculty positions and three times as many tenured faculty positions as Asian women (Taylor 2010).Despite these data, which indicate that Asian Americans are underrepresented by upwards of 50% in the field of ecology, several organizations that provide funding for ecology research, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), do not consider Asian Americans to be an underrepresented minority.As such, Asian Americans are not integrated into diversity goals and initiatives.Such exclusionary measures by important funding sources and the omission of discourse on racial discrimination against Asian Americans in ecology may be responsible for the proportion of Asian Americans earning ecology Ph.Ds stagnating despite the substantial increase in Asian Americans within the U.S. population (Fig. 1)."Forgetting" Asian Americans as an underrepresented minority in the field of ecology is not only misguided but also detrimental to our discipline. Why we need Asian American ecologistsThe benefits of a full spectrum of diversity to innovation are well recognized (Phillips et al. 2014): Different perspectives spark different hypotheses and approaches to problem solving.In the field of ecology, we address problems with sociopolitical applications.Solutions to these problems should be

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.