Have you heard of the term Fasian?
It's short for fake Asian.
I'm not sure if it's something that
my friends and I came up with,
but that's basically what I am.
A Fasian. My name is Hayley Yeates.
I was born in South Korea and adopted at five months old.
I've grown up here and lived in Sydney my whole life.
My parents and my extended family
are all white Australians.
For me, I've only ever identified as a proud Australian.
I don't feel like I'm different.
I don't wake up in the morning and consider
how I can leave my best minority life.
I've gotten used to the double-take.
When someone meets me for the first time and
my face and my accent
doesn't quite match the picture in their head.
I laugh about it when people say,
but where are you really from?
I might be a spy with a secret identity.
Most of the time, it's easy
to forget that people can make
assumptions about me just based on how I look.
Not long ago when I was at university,
group assignments, met up a large portion of your marks.
Groups were often formed in the first few weeks,
usually based on who you sit with.
In that time, I noticed
people scanning the room as they walked in.
Evaluating their options.
They look in my direction,
think it over, and then they sit at another table.
For a while, I just assumed it's
probably because I'm just not that smiley.
But several subjects passed,
it was still bothering me until one of my friends said,
Hayley, It's probably because they think you're Asian.
I decided each time I studied a new subject,
I would be that person that had done all of the readings.
I'd put up my hand and I would
answer all of the questions.
I felt like if I put in the extra effort and I spoke up,
my classmates would think I was
somebody worth working with.
After going above and beyond in too many subjects,
I realized I was making myself
work harder than everybody else, just to be saying.
I found myself consciously and subconsciously
modifying my behavior to manage these assumptions.
I found myself not wanting to buy certain items of
clothing or wear my glasses to
work in case I looked too Asian.
For years, I didn't have a picture on
my LinkedIn profile because I didn't want
anyone to think that I wouldn't make
a good communications manager
because English look like it might be my second language.
I was secretly grateful to have a westernized name.
One day I realized if this is what it's like for me,
a fake Asian, what's it like
for someone who's genuinely from another culture?
It stands to reason if you were raised in
a culture different to
the one that you end up working in,
you're probably going to feel some pressure to adapt.
An Australian study of people with Asian backgrounds,
including India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka,
found that two-thirds of people
surveyed felt that they needed to
conform to angler size ideas
of teamwork and leadership to be successful.
The irony of this is that cultural diversity,
it's actually great for business.
McKinsey's study of over 300 multinational companies
found that companies which were in
the top quartile for ethnic diversity,
they were 35 percent more likely to
have financial returns above their competitors.
When you start to look at it,
there's extensive research that
suggests just why this might be the case.
Culturally diverse teams can produce
more accurate work by
tapping into a wider variety of skills and experience.
They're able to focus more effects and remain objective.
There are also more innovative.
Studies have shown culturally diverse teams
are more likely to develop new products.
They're also better able to solve
problems and make decisions.
I don't mean the decisions like,
what are we going to order at Yum Cha?
I still get asked this quite a lot.
The decisions which reflect the diversity of
an organization's staff and their customers.
If it's beneficial for businesses to help people
feel that they can bring their whole selves to work,
are we making it easy for them?
When the topic of diversity comes up,
it's often in relation to gender diversity.
We've looked deep into the barriers
to gender equality at work,
the gender pay gap,
female representation in senior management
and on boards, the glass ceiling.
We've become more and more educated
on how to tackle the problem.
Support groups, quarters versus targets.
As women, we've been told to get mentored,
reach higher, lean in, and speak up.
But what about cultural minorities?
What if you're Asian and female?
Do I need to lean in twice as hard?
Asian American leadership, author Jane Hyun
coined the term the Bamboo Ceiling.
Similar to what the glass ceiling is for women,
the Bamboo Ceiling refers to barriers that people with
Asian backgrounds face in
workplaces with Western cultures.
When I first read about the Bamboo Ceiling,
I felt a bit guilty.
Guilty how I had handled myself in
those university classes and take
it upon myself to manage other people's expectations.
I was somehow reinforcing these multiple ceilings.
Go to company numbers on hiring, retention,
promotion of tech companies in
Silicon Valley over a period of nine years.
While Asians were the largest minority in the industry,
even outnumbering what people at an entry-level,
they were the least likely to
be promoted into management.
Black and Latino representation had actually declined,
and while white women
seem to be climbing the corporate ladder,
minority women would just not.
In fact, race had over three-and-a-half times
the negative impact on
career progression than gender did.
Probably the most upsetting conclusion in
a sense report was that the millennial generation,
my generation is unlikely to crack the cultural ceiling.
Are we seriously looking at
another decade of people thinking twice
about using a profile picture
or their given names on a job application.
When I think about legacy,
it's not just something to be posthumously preserved.
It's something that should drive us
forward into the future
and make us want to work towards
something better than what we have now.
Diversity and inclusion,
there's much more than a couple of
mentions in an annual report
or even workshops on implicit bias.
It's about shifting to a more globalized mindset and
expanding our definitions of
what teamwork and leadership can look like.
It's time to go beyond the demographics of this issue.
The who and the what. We need to
be looking at the how and the why.
Authentic, unrestrained conversations to look deep
into the barriers the cultural minorities
and their employers face.
Because as far as I know,
there isn't going to be a data point that's going
to tell you how it feels to think
your peers might be avoiding working with you
just based on how you look.
Or how good it can feel to look at
your organization and see diversity
truly represented at every level.
To break the glass, Bamboo,
and whatever other ceilings there may be,
let's create environments where we
can bring our whole selves to work.
Because the next generation
deserves to feel like they are in
off and because there's
real strength in our differences. Thank you.