Should I Stay or Should I Go? The Contextualized Intersectionality Among Global Professionals

After studying or working for a period in the United States, young professionals from all over the world face a migration dilemma--whether to stay or go. One of the largest groups, East Asians, are found to face drawbacks (e.g., bamboo ceiling) in their prospect in the United States, yet it is unclear how gender, another prominent status characteristic, plays a role in their status calculus and migration decision. Taking heritage culture as an important context into the intersectional analyses, we propose that compared to East Asian women, East Asian men can expect more social privileges in heritage countries and more social penalties from incongruence with the agentic norm in the United States. The expected status differentials in heritage countries and the host country may motivate East Asian women rather than East Asian men to stay. As the visible representation of a group in public fields can be one source of the expected social status, in Study 1a-1b, we found that the male advantages in Congress positions and Netflix exposures disappeared or became reversed among East Asians in the United States. In Study 2, by analyzing global MBA job placement records from an elite business school across five years, we found actual rates of staying in the United States differ sharply by gender, especially among East Asians. In Study 3, a survey on another MBA cohort, we found that the greater rate of female stayers is explained by their social status expectancy differential in their heritage countries and the United States.