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Book Review: Labor Economics: Doing Engineering: The Career Attainment and Mobility of Caucasian, Black, and Asian-American Engineers

Asian-Americans have long been perceived as "the model minority" who have excelled in education and achieved high occupational status in a relatively short period of time. Part of this perception is based on the belief that Americans of Asian descent have been particularly successful in technical fields; American culture is replete with stereotypical images of Asian-American scientists and engineers and hard-working Asian-American math and science students. Indeed, the recent controversy over the alleged security risks posed by technical professionals of Asian origin may reflect a degree of backlash or resentment against this perceived level of success in technical fields. But how successful have Asian-Americans really been? Recent scholarship in the social sciences has begun to call into question the image of uniformly successful Asian-Americans. Joyce Tang's Doing Engineering adds another dimension to this scholarship by examining one of the fields in which Asian-Americans have allegedly done best: engineering. Basing her analysis on a national survey of engineers and scientists conducted for the U.S. Bureau of the Census by the National Science Foundation, Tang compares the career attainment of white, black, and Asian-American e gineers. She considers a variety of issues, including whether there are group differences in rates of full-time employment (and unemployment), whether minority engineers differ from white engineers in their commitment to engineering as a profession, whether there are group differences in access to managerial positions, and whether the three groups experience different rates of downward mobility ("back-tracking") or career shifts in and out of technical work ("track-switching"). Tang concludes that the image of AsianAmerican engineers as epitomizing the "model minority" is somewhat overdrawn. She notes, first of all, that there is no real evidence that the percentage of employed engineers who are of Asian descent is growing. According to her statistics, whites continue to hold 90% of all engineering positions; indeed, one table she presents seems to indicate that the percentage of employed white engineers has been growing faster than engineering employment as a whole (she does not comment on this, however). It is only among engineers with advanced degrees that one can identify a shift toward those of Asian descent. Tang suggests that the apparent increase in Asian engineers really represents a shift in the origins of immigrant engineersAmerica used to import European engineers and now imports Asians. I have some doubts about this argument because Tang does not clearly distinguish here between Asian-Americans and immigrant engineers from Asia; nevertheless, it is suggestive and certainly points to the need for caution in estimating the magnitude of the Asian presence in engineering. Using sophisticated logistic regression to determine the probability of various outcomes for each of the three groups, Tang then considers whether whites, blacks, and Asian-Americans differ in other respects. Among her more significant findings are that both black and Asian-American engineers are more likely than comparable whites to be unemployed and less likely to be employed full-time, and that minority engineers are less likely to be promoted into managerial positions. Interestingly, she also found distinctive patterns among Asian-American engineers: by comparison to black and white engineers, Asian-American engineers were less likely to be in technical management and were less likely to move from technical management into general management. Tang concludes that while barriers to entry and promotion exist for both black and Asian-American engineers (and may be greatest for blacks, given their extremely small numbers in engineering), successful black and white engineers have career patterns that are quite similar and differ in significant ways from those experienced by Asian-American engineers. Tang's book effectively challenges the con-