Argumentative Essay About Being Chinese Women

To clarify, this argument is not to conflate being Asian with automatically meaning being Chinese. Rather, Asians as a “race” are typically the subject of research, and as the Chinese make up the majority of the population in question, the results for Asian-Americans are extrapolated to fit the Chinese. The specific cases that will be used as examples all involve Chinese-Americans.
Chinese women face an additional layer of discrimination, which can be likened to a double-paned glass ceiling, because of the intersection of their racialized and gendered experiences. “Women are 17 percent of boards and 16 percent of senior executives in Silicon Valley, but Asian-American women are less than 1 percent in both” (Guynn, 2017). Asian-Americans as

This leads to a common perception of these women not facing as much, if any, discrimination. “Yet research from Joan C. Williams, a professor at UC Hastings College of the Law, shows that Asian women report experiencing as much bias, and sometimes more, than other women do” (Guynn, 2017).
Chinese women are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment in the male-dominated tech industry and comment on having to become accustomed to this “routine discrimination that hampers their careers” (Guynn, 2017). Ellen Pao notably filed a lawsuit in 2012 accusing her former employer, a venture capital firm, “of not promoting her because of her gender and retaliating against her for complaining [and] lost on all counts” (Guynn, 2017) because of lack of definitive evidence.

The latter, such as H-1B workers, are generally viewed as “cheap laborers who take away the jobs that would otherwise go to Americans” (Wong, 2006) and thus do not feel welcomed by local workers. Their employers usually wish to increase the number of these visas so they can make the most profit, but others are against this expansion because they believe the visas “cheapen wages and encourage age discrimination” (Wong, 2006) by hiring younger immigrants willing to accept lower wages. Additionally, even among the gaoji huagong, or high class laborers, there is a feeling of “only [being] assigned work to be done according to deadlines and specifications” (Wong, 2006). Though these immigrants believe they are highly skilled workers and are expected to act as such, they are treated like low status manual laborers. Some of them even return to China, but as a temporary home before going back to the U.S., in sharp contrast to the earliest Chinese immigrants who saw the U.S. as their temporary residence before they could return to their homeland with