Margaret M. Chin

Margaret M. Chin is Professor and Chair of Sociology at CUNY Hunter College and the Graduate Center, and the author of two award winning books, Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don’t Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder and Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry. A third book was just released late 2023- The Peer Effect: How Your Peers Shape Who You Are and Who You Will Become written with Syed Ali.

She was born and raised in New York City and is herself a child of working class Chinese immigrant parents. Dr Chin received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from Columbia University.  She is a board member of the Tenement Museum and is a co-founder and board member of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard.

Prof. Chin is the author of two award winning books. Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry (Columbia University Press, 2005/15), an illuminating ethnography on the Chinese, Korean, Mexican and Ecuadorian garment workers, was honored by the Coalition for Labor Union Women (CLUW) and received an honorable mention from the Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award committee of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association. Her second book, Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don’t Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder (NYU Press, 2020), an interview analysis of how factors such as race and trust can hold second generation Asian Americans back, was the winner for the Association of American Publishers 2021 PROSE (Professional and Scholarly Excellence) Book Award in the Business, Finance, and Management category. She is currently working on a third book with sociologist Syed Ali, tentatively titled, The Peer Effect: Building Better Schools and Better Workplaces.

Her honors include an American Sociological Association’s Minority Fellows Award, a NSF Dissertation Grant, a Social Science Research Councils Postdoctoral Fellowship in International Migration, and a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship. She was the vice president of the Eastern Sociological Society (2015-2016). She is affiliated with Hunter College’s Asian American Center and the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, CUNY’s Asian/ Asian American Research Institute, and the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, USA Today, Marketwatch and other news outlets.

• Harvard University (B.A.)
• Columbia University (Ph.D.)

Latest Videos and Podcasts

• Let It RiP CUNY TV  Sept 20232- Affirmative Action and Legacy admissions
• Civics 101 Pod cast Aug 2023 – What is (or was) Affirmative Action
• Museum of Chinese in America  Feb 2023- MOCA talks with Margaret M. Chin

Opinion Pieces

• Washington Post 2021 The Model Minority Myth Hurts Asian Americans and even leads to violence
• Commonwealth Magazine 2020 Attack Resumes on Racial Diversity in Higher Ed
• Inside Higher Ed Nov 2019 Higher ed needs more Affirmative Action Not Less
• Medium 2019 Ten Reasons not to Fall for the Asian American Penalty Trap in Admissions
• The Atlantic Jun 2018 What’s Going On with NYC’s Elite Public High Schools ? (with Syed Ali)

Media Quotes

• The Nation 2023 Inside the Cynical Campaign to Claim that Affirmative Action Hurts Asian Americans
• NBCnews.com 2022 Asian America  Asian American women fall by 80% at Corp Leadership Levels
• USA Today 2022 – Asian Women are Shut Out of Leadership at America’s Top Companies
• Bloomberg Businessweek 2021 Why Silicon Valley’s Asian Americans Still Feel Like a Minority
• MarketWatch 2021 Asian Americans are Still Viewed As Forever Foreign
• Bloomberg Businessweek 2021 A Sociologist Explains Why AsAm sense a limit at Work

Press Coverage

• USA Today 2022 Asian women are shut out of leadership at America’s top companies
• MarketWatch 2021 Asian Americans are Still Viewed As Forever Foreign
• Washington Post 2021 Senator Grassley congratulates Korean American judge on her work ethic. Some Asain Americans say it echoes divisive stereotypes
• Guardian 2021 The forgotten neighborhood: how New York’s Chinatown survived 9/11 to face a new crisis
• Washington Post 2021 The Model Minority Myth Hurts Asian Americans and even leads to violence
• Bloomberg Businessweek 2021 A Sociologist Explains Why AsAm sense a limit at Work
• Today.com 2021 What is the Bamboo Ceiling?
  
• Vox 2022 The Women’s Work of the Pandemic
• Inside Higher Ed Nov 2019 Higher ed needs more Affirmative Action not Less
  
• Medium 2019 Ten Reasons not to Fall for the Asian American Penalty Trap in Admissions
• The Atlantic Jun 2018 What’s Going On with NYC’s Elite Public High Schools ?

Sites to Peruse

• Tenement Talk – Chinatown – 9/11 and the end of the Garment Industry
• One to One with Sheryl McCarthy October 1, 2018
• Unionizing Women Garment Workers panel at the NY Historical Society

Publications

• The Peer Effect: How Your Peers Shape Who You Are and Who You will Become (co-authored with Syed Ali)
• Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don’t Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder.
• Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry

Recent Publications:

• “The Backbone of Chinatown: Chinese Women and the Garment Industry 1950-2001.” in Our Voices, Our Histories: Asian American and Pacific Islander Women. Edited by Shirley Hune and Gail Nomura. NYU Press 2020.
• “Chinatown, the Garment and Restaurant Industries, and Labor.” with Ken Guest. In Labor’s City. Edited by Josh Freeman. New York: Columbia University Press 2019.
• “Beneath Each Layer of Cloth: Chinese Women in the New York City Garment Industry”, a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies, edited by Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Routledge 2017.
• “Tales from the Field: Research Methods and Approaches to Studying Community” John J. Chin, Margaret M. Chin, Tarry Hum, Peter Kwong, and Zai Liang. CUNY Forum 2017 Winter.
• “Navigating the Road to Work: Second Generation Asian American Finance Workers.” With Hyein Lee. Harvard Kennedy School. Asian American Public Policy Review. Vol 26. 2016
• “Asian American Second Generation, Bamboo Ceilings, and Affirmative Action,” Contexts, V15 N1 pp 70-73. 2016.
• Min Zhou, Margaret M. Chin, and Rebecca Y Kim. The Transformation of Chinese American Communities: New York vs. Los Angeles. In New York and Los Angeles: The Uncertain Future edited by Halle and Beveridge. Oxford University Press. 2013.