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Even in workplaces that aim to be fair, discrimination can slip by unnoticed. New research finds that when Asian Americans experience potentially biased treatment at work, others are less likely to recognize it as discrimination or step in as allies.

Tony Kong

"In many workplaces, it’s not that anyone is trying to be unfair, but patterns of awareness and interpretation add up,” said��Tony Kong, professor of organizational leadership and information analytics at the Leeds School of Business and co-author of the research.

Published online in November 2025 in the journal��, the research examined why racial discrimination against Asian Americans is often overlooked. Across 13 studies, the researchers used experiments, surveys and real-world data to examine workplace scenarios, perceptions of discrimination against various Asian American subgroups, and nearly 600,000 discrimination claims filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 2011 and 2017.

The researchers, who also included Sora Jun of Rice University and Junfeng Wu of the University of Texas at Dallas, found that Asian Americans are less likely to be seen as “prototypical” targets of racial discrimination at work. In other words, Asian Americans tend to be overlooked as targets of discrimination, even in cases identical to those experienced by Black Americans.��

Kong said the researchers chose Black Americans as a comparison group because they are likely to be the most prototypical target of racial discrimination and are the most studied racial group in workplace discrimination research.

"Asian Americans tend to fall in the middle of the U.S. racial hierarchy,” Kong said. “People usually focus more on the top or the bottom of this hierarchy. If you’re in the middle, you get less attention.”

“The middle part is tricky, because people likely think, ‘You have resources, you have ability, so I don’t need to support you,’ even though Asian Americans might still face biased or discriminatory treatment and need allyship,” Kong said.

In controlled and field experiments, participants reviewed scenarios such as a job candidate being passed over for a position. If the job candidate was Asian American, observers were less likely to perceive discrimination than if the candidate was Black, even though the scenarios were otherwise the same. This “invisibility effect” showed up across multiple Asian American subgroups, including East Asian, Southeast Asian and South Asian candidates.��

Real-world data also supported the pattern: Discrimination claims filed with the EEOC by Asian American employees were significantly less likely to be resolved favorably—13.3% of cases—compared with 15.6% for Black employees and 15.7% for multiracial employees.

Kong said these patterns likely extend beyond discrimination against Asian Americans. Any social group that doesn’t match people’s mental image of who faces discrimination can be overlooked, he said, and as a result, may receive less support from others. That could include, but is not limited to, other racial and ethnic minority groups, some gender and sexual minority groups, and people with intersectional identities, he said.

It’s worth taking a closer look at which social groups don’t fit the “usual picture” of discrimination—and what that means, Kong said. “These are probably the people who fall victim to our psychological biases or blind spots," he said. "We need to check our assumptions and beliefs first: Does the person fit the prototype? If not, we need to be extra careful about the judgments we’re making, as the judgments could lead to non-action."

The findings point to a broader challenge in creating inclusive and equitable workplaces, Kong added. “When discriminatory experiences go unseen due to our mental models that guide our interpretation, prediction, decision-making and problem-solving, bias can affect our recognition of a person’s negative experience and our bystander responses,” he said, adding that failing to act against discrimination undermines efforts to create inclusive and equitable workplaces.

"This isn’t about making anyone feel guilty; we are human and have psychological tendencies," Kong emphasized. "It’s about awareness of a systematic psychological problem that we need to address collectively through practices, interventions and policies."