Saturday, October 30, 2021

Hmong American PhD student rejected for prestigious fellowship for not being in ‘underrepresented’ group


Khier Casino
Fri, October 29, 2021, 

A Hmong American Ph.D. candidate studying neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was refused a fellowship after it was determined that she was not from an “underrepresented” group because she’s Asian American.

“Model minority” myth: In a Twitter thread, doctoral student Kao Lee Yang said she was nominated for the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) Gilliam Fellowship but was told by a committee that she didn’t fit its “Racial/Ethnic Underrepresentation” criteria.

“We are not a monolithic group,” she said. “While some Asian Americans are academically successful, others like the Hmong, are underrepresented in STEM and academia in general.”

Yang asked the fellowship committee and others in the scientific community to name a Hmong American woman neuroscientist: “I would love to connect with her if she is out there.”


“I am an example of the consequences resulting from the continued practice of grouping people with East /Southeast/South Asian heritages underneath the ‘Asian American’ umbrella,” she added.

Yang went on to explain how the “model minority” myth hurts Asians: “But studies making those claims are looking at aggregated data and are treating Asian Americans as a monolithic group.”

Underrepresentation in science: Under its eligibility criteria, HHMI defined “excluded groups to be persons who identify as Black or African American, Latinx or Hispanic American, American Indian, Native Hawaiian, Alaska Native, and from groups indigenous to the Pacific Island territories of the United States.”

But it does acknowledge that underrepresentation varies “from setting to setting.”

Yang pointed out a couple of ways fellowships like HHMI can do better. First, “Disaggregate Asian American data in studies.” Second, fellowships should broaden “perspectives on what it means to be an ethnic/racial minority who is underrepresented in science and how to support underrepresented students.”

#AcademicTwitter: Yang has received an outpouring of support from fellow scientists and academics since she first posted her thread on Oct. 27.

Featured Image via Howard Hughes Medical Institute (left), @KaoLeeYang1 (right)

  • Hmong Americans - Wikipedia

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hmong_Americans

    According to the 2010 US Census, 260,073 people of Hmong descent reside in the United States up from 186,310 in 2000. The vast majority of the growth since 2000 was from natural increase, except for the admission of a final group of over 15,000 refugees in 2004 and 2005 from Wat Tham Krabok in Thailand. Of the 260,073 Hmong-Americans, 247,595 or 95.2% are Hmong alone, and the remaining 12,478 are mixed …

    Wikipedia · Text under CC-BY-SA license
  • Who are Hmong Americans?

    https://www.the-sun.com/news/3379901/who-are-hmong-americans

    2021-07-30 · HMONG Americans are a minority ethnic group in the USA mainly living across certain states. Most Hmong Americans are either those that immigrated to the United States as refugees in the late 1970s or are their descendants. Here we explain all you need to know.

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