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    Southeast Asians are underrepresented in STEM. The label 'Asian' boxes them out more

    The way data on racial groups is typically collected in the U.S. has sidelined smaller Asian populations like Hmong, Lao and Filipino Americans for decades. Now, there are growing calls for change.
    by Deepa Shivaram Dec 12, 2021 6 minutes
    Rachel Sklar, an environmental epidemiologist and postdoctoral scholar is seen at the San Quentin State Prison in California, collecting data on COVID-19 transmission in the state's prison population. Sklar, who is of Filipino descent, says she has been denied an academic opportunity because some institutions do not consider her to be from a racial group that is underrepresented in STEM.

    When Kao Lee Yang received a nomination from her university for the Gilliam Fellowship by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering and math, she was thrilled. She's spent years working toward her doctorate in Alzheimer's research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

    Yang is Asian American, and more specifically is Hmong American, part of a small minority in the United States with just 327,000 people.

    Though the Hmong population in the U.S. is growing, Hmong Americans are still underrepresented in STEM fields and have lower education rates and higher poverty rates overall, compared to the U.S. population at large.

    For example, while 24% of all Asians in the U.S. have obtained an additional degree after college, and 13% of all Americans have, just 6% of Hmong Americans have, according to the Pew Research Center's 2019 analysis of Census Bureau data. To add to that, a very low percentage of Hmong Americans actually go into STEM fields.

    That's why Yang said she was "blindsided" when HHMI emailed her academic adviser saying she wasn't

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