When Asian and Asian American Women Lead

From Left: Mai Anh Le Tran, Seung Ai Yang,

Grace Kao, and Kwok Pui-lan

Asian and Pacific Islander (API) women have to overcome many obstacles in order to become leaders in their professions. First of all, they have to challenge persistent cultural stereotypes that portray Asian women as gentle, meek, and submissive. The image of a soft-spoken and compliant Asian woman does not fit the cultural expectation that leaders should be active, aggressive, and willing to take risks. API women often have to work much harder to prove ourselves and overcome negative stereotypes. 

But in many Asian communities, women who work outside the home are still expected to be responsible for their children’s care. While it may be possible for Sheryl Sandberg to “lean in” because she can afford to have a lot of help, many women simply do not have that option. In Women Don’t Ask, Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever explore the personal and societal reasons women seldom ask for what they need and deserve at home and at work. This is especially true for Asian women who are new immigrants. They are grateful when they are offered jobs and don’t ask for higher salaries or negotiate benefits, and they frequently do not even realize they can ask. They may also be passed over for promotion. API women may also be hindered by the cultural script that says you should not blow your own horn, and if you ask, then you are too demanding or pushing too hard.  

API women find it hard to take up leadership positions because there are few models and they often harbor doubt about their abilities. Studies have shown that men apply for jobs when they meet 60 percent of the qualifications, while women apply only if they meet 100 percent of them. In theological education in the US and Canada, women make up only about 30 percent of the faculty. Racial and Ethnic minority professors made up only 21 percent of the faculty, showing that seminaries and theological schools do not match the diversity of the population. Asian and Asian American faculty make up about 6 percent, and among them only a small number of women are in full professor rank. Since API women have seldom seen one of their own as a president or dean of seminaries or as a top leader in other professions, it is understandable that they are hesitant to break the glass ceiling. Very often, they are nudged by mentors and trusted friends to apply for and take up leadership posts. Lesbian and queer API women find the path to leadership tortuous for they are marginalized by both white culture and their own ethnic communities. 

Many people have hoped that when women become ordained, the church will change. But unfortunately this is not always the case. If the church’s structure, cultural ethos, and liturgy do not change, women are just performing the same roles as their male colleagues, while the patriarchal structure remains the same. Clericalism remains strong, even though we pay lip service to Reformation’s vision of priesthood of all believers. We have often heard about the idea of servant leadership, but very few leaders actually embody this.  

People sometimes argue that we need women leaders because they will bring a different leadership style, which is more collaborative than men’s. But when some women become leaders, they act as authoritatively as men do, if not even more so, in order to show they are strong and in control. API female leaders can be in a double-bind. If they are not bossy enough, they risk being seen as weak. But if they act aggressively and give out orders, people label them dragon ladies and hard to please. 

It is important to remember that successful leadership depends not only on the quality of the leader, but also on the people she works with. Women can exercise collaborative leadership if the environment allows and encourages it. I think of collaborative leadership not so much as the style of the leader, but a set of practices the leader puts in place with the help of the community, such as transparency in decision-making, open communication, clarification of roles and expectations, mutual accountability, and encouragement of new ideas and feedback. Collaborative leadership is a process, which takes time and effort, and trial and error. 

A collaborative leader enables each member of the community to feel they have ownership and a stake in the success of the whole. I was fascinated by how Tony Hsieh has created a cultural ethos at Zappos to keep his employees motivated and engaged. The employees can decorate their desks and working areas to “create their home away from home” with pictures, office toys, and colorful décor. The company empowers employees with tools to succeed, provides opportunities for continued learning, and allows employees to fulfill their higher purpose.* Indra Nooyi writing thank you notes to parents of each of her direct reports so that they could experience pride in their children also impressed me. Integrating employees’ family members is an example of wholehearted leadership and the emphasis on family is a key element of Asian culture. 

Collaborative leadership works when everything is fine, but is put to the test when conflicts among different constituencies arise. Consider the situation when the board, administration, and faculty cannot agree on the future directions of a school, or when there is a financial shortfall and the church budget has a large deficit. The leader needs to balance the needs and demands of different sectors of the community and is often caught in the middle or in the worse case, ends up as the scapegoat. 

API cultures can be sources of strengths or liabilities in handling conflicts. On the one hand, API cultures value harmony in relationships and tend to avoid conflicts. But avoiding conflicts may lead to covering up of problems, which will only get worse over time. On the other hand, API women have been caught in the middle and serve as the go between in patriarchal systems. In traditional families, they negotiate between the demands of husbands and mothers-in-law and other in-laws. There may be lessons gleaned from navigating complicated relationships. 

Female leaders attract admiration and envy from both men and women. As leaders, they are judged more harshly than their male counterparts; just ask Hillary Clinton or Carla Fiorina. This is one of the reasons API women may not want to consider leadership positions because they can’t bear to lose face and be publicly criticized. They have to develop very tough skin to deal with insidious sexism in the workplace.  Because Asian cultures place so much emphasis  on shame, API women often internalize blame and guilt when something goes wrong. It is important to separate between personal attack and rational criticism. Women leaders need to accept criticisms when they are due, but reject misogynous smears.

Rita Nakashima Brock

Many years ago my school invited Rita Nakashima Brock to speak to the community. In her talk, she warned that women need to avoid self-sabotage. For example, a woman might be under so much pressure, with one bad thing piling up on top of another, that she is just ready to snap. With no more than a slight provocation, all of the garbage built up inside would come bursting out. She advised that women need to have a metaphorical “delete” button or a “recycle bin” so that they have a place to put all that negative stuff.  

Finding a healthy way to decompress and to deal with pressure in life is vital for women leaders for the long haul. In the past, women have tended to share with their confidants to seek support. The recent impeachment of President Park Geun-hye sounds caution. Park said she leads a “lonely life” and trusted too much in her friend. Sometimes women leaders can live in a bubble in their own alternate universe, alienated from the people they serve. It is crucial to lead a balanced life and to have friends and colleagues who can offer a healthy reality check. Meditation, exercise, and yoga are good ways for renewal and relaxation. 

Women leaders stand on the shoulders of women who have gone before them. In many women’s liturgies, we recall the names of foremothers who have been influential in our lives. We know that our success is based on the work and sacrifice of many other women. Therefore, once we become leaders, let us remember to push the doors wider for women from the upcoming generation.  People sometimes ask why I spent so much time in mentoring students and junior faculty. I would tell them that I grew up in a working-class family and my parents came to Hong Kong as refugees. I would never have been where I am today if not for so many people’s encouragement and investment in me. When I first came to the US some thirty years ago, Katie Geneva Cannon and other white women mentored me. Beverly Harrison invited me to speak for the first time at the American Academy of Religion on women’s work in China. When I became one of the few Asian women theological faculty, I decided to help to make the road wider for others. 

Pacific Asian North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry was started by a group of Asian and Asian American women, with mentoring by Letty Russell and Shannon Clarkson. In 1997, the Asian and Asian American faculty in the network acknowledged our debt to Letty and Shannon for their many years of service and took over fundraising and other administrative duties from them. The same year we began the doctoral seminar to provide assistance for doctoral students to develop their dissertation proposals and to learn professional skills. Celebrating our thirtieth anniversary in 2015, Su Yon Pak and Jung Ha Kim have coedited Leading Wisdom: Asian and Asian North American Women Leaders, which will come out this fall. As the coeditors wrote, “this book is yet another testimony of how the PANAAWTM movement enables women leaders to experience the nurturing and empowerment necessary to define their calling and ministry on their own terms.” I hope the book will inspire more API women to become leaders to change the church and the world.

* Mig Pascual, “Zappos: 5 Out-of-the-Box Ideas to Keep Employees Engaged,” US News, October 30, 2012, http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/outside-voices-careers/2012/10/30/zappos-5-out-of-the-box-ideas-for-keeping-employees-engaged.

This is a presentation made at the annual meeting of PANAAWTM on March 19, 2017 at Delaware, Ohio.

Anglican Women on Church and Mission

The Anglican Communion is in crisis. The battle over homosexuality, with its intense media coverage, threatens to rip the Church apart. The debates on women bishops in the Church of England caused anger and frustrations among female clergy and their supporters. Some conservative Anglican bishops and their followers have formed a Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, chastising the Church as having gone astray from true biblical teaching. These controversies epitomize the challenges facing the Communion and touch on fundamental issues such as the crisis of Anglican identity, the nature of authority and provincial autonomy, contrasting views on biblical interpretation, and ecumenical relations with other churches. The tenor of the debates is also influenced by the shift of Christian demographics from the global North to the global South. If the contentious issue of women’s ordination did not break the Anglican Church apart in the 1970s, some are less optimistic that the Communion can weather the present storm and find ways to remain together.

Yet even as gender and sexuality issues remain at the heart of these debates, voices of women from the Communion have not been clearly heard or appreciated. Media coverage and church pronouncements tend to focus on the opinions of bishops, as if they could represent the range of diversity within the member churches, or of spokespersons of various Anglican networks and agencies, who are mostly male and clergy. The voices of lay people and women are marginalized, even though women make up the majority of many churches. This groundbreaking volume attempts to fill this gap by inviting female church leaders, scholars, and theological educators from across the Communion to share their reflections on the Anglican Church and its mission. An anthology such as this makes a unique contribution because there are very few substantial works by women from different parts of the Communion. It is even rarer for the majority of the book’s authors to have grown up in the global South, bringing with them the rich textures and multilayered experiences of the Anglican Church.

The book originated at a conference for Anglican female theological educators at Canterbury, United Kingdom, in the spring of 2009. The women gathered became very conscious of the fact that we had few women leading theological schools in the Anglican Communion. Although there are several books on Anglican women’s history, mission, and struggles for leadership, they are mostly limited to a single country and do not cover the Communion as a whole. Judith A. Berling, Jenny Te Paa, and I decided to coedit this book to broaden the conversation.

The book is divided into two parts. Part one provides Anglican historical and theological perspective on the Church. Contributors include Ellen K. Wondra, Jane Shaw, Wendy Fletcher, Jenny Te Paa, and I. We discuss the transition from a colonial church to a global Communion, the problems of authority, the debates on sexuality, women's struggle for ordination, and women’s leadership development in the Communion. 

Part two focuses on Anglican women and God’s mission. Gulner E. Francis-Dehqani, Cordelia Moyse, Esther M. Mombo, Denise M. Ackermann, Clara Luz Ajo Lázaro, and Judy Berinai are the contributors. The chapters discuss the involvement of women in the Church Mission Society in Iran, the work of the Mothers’ Union, the Church’s involvement in poverty alleviation in Africa, the Church and the HIV and AIDS pandemic, cultural diversity and women’s spirituality within the Communion, and women witnessing Christ in a Muslim context. 

We hope that this book will promote dialogue and scholarship on women in the Communion. We are very grateful to those faithful Anglican women who have gone before us, and we hope that women in the upcoming generation will be given greater responsibilities and leadership opportunities in the Church.

 

*Adapted from Anglican Women on Church and Mission © 2013 the Church Publishing Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY.

 

Challenges of Theological Field Education Today

Williamsburg, Virginia

I have addressed theologians, biblical scholars, practical theologians, and even supervisors of clinical pastoral education. But I have never spoken to a gathering of directors of theological field education, until last Thursday.

The 32nd biennial consultation of the Association of Theological Field Education (ATFE) was held at Williamsburg, Virginia. I was invited to deliver the keynote address on “From Pasts to Possibilities: Religious Leadership in 2040.” It was my first time to this historic city, the capital of the Colony of Virginia from 1699 to 1780. Together with Jamestown and Yorktown, Williamsburg formed the Historic Triangle of colonial Virginia.

About 130 people attended the consultation: the majority was from the United States and about five each from Canada and Australia. Almost half of the participants have served as directors of theological field education for less then ten years. About ten people attended the consultation for the first time.

Our hotel is located across from the College of William and Mary, the second oldest institution of higher education in the U.S., established in 1693. The College was named after the monarchs of England, Scotland, and Ireland at the time. The portraits of William and Mary are hung at a parlor in the hotel. This was the first time that I saw the portraits of English monarchs in an American building. The Colony of Virginia was the first English colony in the so-called New World.

About fifty yard from the hotel is the historic First Baptist Church, which dated back to the 1700s, when the slaves and free blacks wanted to have their worship separated from their slave owners. After the Civil War, the Church provided support for the newly freed blacks.

Given the rich history of the city, I talked about the colonial past, the abolition movement, and the Civil Rights movement and pointed to nation building as imperial formation in the United States.

I challenged the field educators to be bold in the formation of religious leaders for 2040, when there will be no racial and ethnic majority in the U.S. We will need flexible, agile, and forward-looking leaders of faith communities in preparation for a racially, culturally, and religiously diverse United States.

Instead of sending seminarians to learn from experienced supervisor-mentors in church settings, which they are already familiar with, directors of field education should ask, “What kind of new field sites and new experiences our students would need in order to prepare for a much more diverse church and society leading to 2040?”

What if we see theological field education not as apprenticeship, but more like a laboratory—a place to try out and test new things?

At the gathering, I learned that some schools have already tried out new models of field or contextual education. For example, at Vancouver School of Theology, second year students work in studios—non-traditional field sites—to learn about creative leadership and ministry. In their senior year, students do their field work in church contexts.

I also learned that in some Roman Catholic schools, conversations about field education are often conducted in global and cross-cultural perspectives, because of the diversity brought by international students, who are priests and nuns from the Global South.

After my keynote address, many people came up to me to discuss and share their work. My heart was warmed when a younger director who attended the consultation for the first time told me that my address had broadened his understanding of his vocation as a director of field education.

Another person came to tell me about summer field education in the national parks, which I have not heard about. The students meet all kinds of people at the parks and offer pastoral care and counseling for people who need them.

I am very grateful for the privilege of addressing the directors of theological field education. Special thanks go to my colleague William Kondrath, director of field education and professor of pastoral theology at my school. Kondrath is a senior member of ATFE, having served as a director of field education for nearly two decades. Conversations with him helped me understand the changing contexts of theological field education today.

Running for the President of the American Academy of Religion

“Pui Lan, would you be willing to run for the Vice-President of AAR?” the chair of the Nominations Committee of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) called and asked me back in April 2008.

The AAR, with 10,000 members, is the world’s largest professional organization of scholars in religion. The majority of its members are from the U.S., but approximately 17 percent are international scholars from over 70 countries.

It was a great honor to have been nominated—for the Vice-President would be in line to become the President in 2011. The problem was that there would be an election and I would have to compete with another candidate, who happened to be a professor at Harvard University.

I thought, “If I win, that’s good. But what happens if I lose?”

That spring Hillary Clinton was competing with Barack Obama to be the nominee for the Democratic Party. She lost to Obama in the Iowa caucus and fought back tears after being asked how she kept going in New Hampshire.

Although I was rooting for Obama, I was deeply impressed by Clinton’s courage to face defeat after defeat so publicly.

I asked myself, “If Clinton can face losses in such a public way, what do I have to lose?”

Yes, what have I got to lose?

I decided to run for the AAR presidency because I wanted to stand up for others. Even when I was a doctoral student, I was frequently invited to speak in meetings in churches and academia. I would be the lone Asian woman speaking on a panel.

I generally preferred to stand up when speaking so that the audience could see me. Very often after my speech, there would be a soft-spoken, timid Asian female student, who would come up to tell me that she was glad to see me standing and speaking. In the 1980s, an Asian feminist theologian was a rare sight.

So when I received the call, I remembered these Asian women students who once told me they were proud to see an Asian woman standing. When I said yes, I was answering to a larger call in life.

In a Wabash workshop for pre-tenured Asian and Asian American faculty, I said that as leaders, we have to bring the tribe along. Those of us who are pioneers have the responsibility of opening the door a little wider for others to come.

After Hillary lost, she told the misty crowd gathered at Washington’s National Building Museum: “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it.” She also said, “And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.”

I have received many awards and recognitions in life. The AAR presidency would be like icing on the cake. Like Hillary, I want to make the path a little easier for others next time.

In the 102 years of history of the AAR, only seven or eight racial and ethnic minority scholars have been elected as President. I am the second person of Asian descent to have been elected; the first one was Professor Vasudha Narayanan of the University of Florida, who specializes in Hinduism. She was also the first woman of color to have served in this prestigious position.

Some Asian American scholars and students organized a banquet to honor me on the eve of the AAR annual meeting at San Francisco on November 18. I said to them, “Tomorrow night I will deliver the Presidential Address. I hope that many years later, you will remember that I stood up and spoke from the podium.” I wanted to encourage them to answer the call and accept invitations and challenges that come their way. If I can stand up, they can too.