The Bamboo Ceiling in US Business Schools: Who Receives Tenure and Becomes Dean?

Abstract

In the US, Asians are commonly viewed as the “model minority” in business academia. Some inspiring initiatives intended to help ethnic minorities to attain tenure and deanship exclude Asians from participating, perhaps because Asians are assumed to be already successful. I challenge this assumption by revealing a “Bamboo Ceiling” in tenure, full professorship, and deanship in US business schools. I analyze a 10-year panel of tenure-track professors and deans at top-50 US business schools. Although Asians appear well represented at first glance, a stark contrast emerges once I distinguish between East Asians (e.g., ethnic Chinese) and South Asians (e.g., ethnic Indians): Among all ethnicities, East Asian faculty are proportionally the least likely to be tenured professors, full professors, and deans, whereas South Asian faculty are the most likely. Moreover, East Asians tend to be employed by lower-ranked schools. To understand these puzzling patterns, I construct large-scale datasets to test potential contributing factors, including (a) faculty recruitment bar, (b) research productivity, (c) research impact, (d) teaching evaluations, (e) invited seminar talks, (f) social media activities, and (g) social media mentions. As one of the largest endeavors to examine ethnic disparities in academia, this research extends the diversity, equity, and inclusion literature and the “leaky pipeline” literature by uncovering East Asian faculty’s neglected challenges in US business schools.

Speaker Biography

Jackson G. Lu is the General Motors Associate Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He currently serves as a Senior Editor for Organization Science, a Senior Editor for Management and Organization Review, and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He received his PhD from Columbia Business School in 2018 and early tenure from MIT in 2023.

Jackson has published extensively in top general science journals (Nature Human Behaviour, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), management journals (Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Organization Science), and psychology journals (Annual Review of Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Bulletin, Psychological Science). His research has been featured in over 300 media outlets (e.g., BBC, The Economist, The Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, NPR, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Washington Post).

He has received prestigious awards and honors, including “40 Best Business School Professors in the World Under 40,” “30 Thinkers to Watch,” and over 50 research awards from the Academy of Management, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Behavioral Science & Policy Association, the International Association for Conflict Management, the International Society for Self and Identity, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. He also received the Best Senior Editor Award from Management and Organization Review in 2022, 2023, and 2024.