What Usman Khawaja got wrong about discrimination in corporate Australia

Ahead of the Asian-Australian Leadership Awards ceremony to be held this week, Australian cricketer Usman Khawaja appealed for corporate Australia to get rid of its “unconscious bias” against Asian-Australians, quoting a recent statistic that only five in 100 leading Australian companies have CEOs of Asian heritage.

If there was ever a book on how not to be successful, Khawaja just gave it to us immigrants. His suggestion that discrimination stymies Asian success is both counterproductive and harmful. It fixates on a narrow metric – representation among the top 1 per cent of corporate leaders – while completely ignoring the broader, optimistic data on Asian-Australian achievement.

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