Asian Women in Politics

The match of Hilary and Obama makes this year's presidential election the most interesting ever. Either one wins (at least for the Democrats Party) will make the history, because they are minority – woman and African American. Imagine it was an African American woman versus a white man. How about an Asian American woman? Trust me, it will happen one day, just not soon.

According to Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University of New Jersey, there are 86 women serving in the 110th U.S. Congress, only two of them are Asian Americans. Of the 1,741 women state legislators serving nationwide, only 30 are Asian-American women. Consider 5% of the population in the U.S. is Asian; we are definitely underrepresented in Asian women politics.

Knowledge and culture could be the major reasons for the disproportion. Many Asian women immigrants simply do not know much about American politics. Some of them do not even realize women have the right to and should vote. They think their husbands, fathers or sons would represent the families.

Another issue is the complex composition of Asian Americans. Chinese, Filipinos, Asian Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese are only some of the subgroups under the Asian American label. We speak different native languages and have different community issues. The challenge is to unit the Asian American. Only then, Asian voice – men and women alike – will be heard in politics.

When it comes to Asian marketing, I always remind people to be sensitive about the differences among subgroups of Asian Americans. As for politics, I urge all the Asian American to look at our similarities instead.

To unite is to empower. I sincerely hope I will have a chance in this lifetime to vote for a capable Asian American woman to be the President of the United States.

Asian Languages

Here is an old story. Unfortunately, it still happens a lot.

A company asked me to translate a brochure into 5 languages. Which five? Whatever their current customer speak the most.

So, I reviewed their customer profile. There was no language information. Why? They thought it was legal issue. In fact, although the law says you can't ask people ethnicity background, it doesn't say you can't ask your customers their preferred communication languages.

How about the diversity survey the company had done some time ago? That should help. Let's see. Here was the customer ethnicity breakdown: x% African American, y% Hispanic and z% Asian American. Sir, please note that while all Hispanics speak Spanish, Asians speak a million different languages.

Could we review the customer's last name? Sure, but there were tens of thousands of customers.

Final solution: Review where the Asian American customers are. Compare it to Asian subgroup population. Then, make an intelligent guess.

There is another easy alternative: Just pick the top foreign languages Asian American depend the most – Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese. FYI, most South Asian, Filipino and Japanese speak English well.

No one says "I am an Asian"

Go ask any Asian looking people around you for their ethnicity. I bet no one would say he is Asian. Rather, they would say they are Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian, Vietnamese, Filipino, Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian and such. They may say they are from Asia (knowing you probably don’t know what Khmer is or where Cambodia is anyway). They just would not say they are Asian.

It is just like people would tell you they are French, Italian, German, Irish; or they may say they are from Europe. They would not say they are European.

"Asian" is a term used in Census, in survey, and in business. Asian Americans are learned to check the box next to Asian when filling out forms. They tell people we are Asian Americans in our online profiles. Yet they actually see themselves Chinese/ Korean/ Japanese/ Indian/...

Hispanic used to be a census term too. Years ago, there were Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, Argentinean, Dominicans, Colombians, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Ecuadorian, Hondurans, Nicaraguans, Bolivians, Peruvians, Venezuelans, Spaniard and even Latino… but no Hispanic in America. It was then. Now, all the subgroups are happy to claim themselves Hispanic. Each Hispanic subgroup may have different culture, value and dialect. Yet they share the same media in the same language. Yes, it was the media that put them together.

This is not the same case for Asian. Though Asian subgroups share some similarity in culture and values, they speak different languages. They don’t see themselves as one big segment. In fact, people even further differentiate themselves within a subgroup. For instance, Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong Chinese, Macau Chinese, Singaporean.

It explains why one of the first questions Asian marketing professionals have for any campaign is: Which segment/subgroup should be covered in the plan?

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