By Haley Kim
We’ve all, at some point in our lives, encountered that 2012 gray Toyota Prius going 30 miles per hour on the freeway and thought to ourselves, “I just know there’s a short Asian lady in her mid-forties sitting in the front seat.” And sure enough, you’ll begin to pass by the car to find a small Asian woman who can barely see over the wheel, inclined at a 45-degree angle. You do a small victory cheer in your head and laugh with your siblings in the back seat. But here’s the catch: the joke only works because we’ve rehearsed it in our heads. We build mental images of all small asian women in Toyotas as bad drivers so that once we see one, it feels like we’re proving ourselves right. We don’t think twice about that white BMW that just ran a red light or the pick-up truck that’s tailgating the right lane, but once we find our target on a Honda Minivan, we immediately look for who’s in the driver’s seat. This split-second assumption reveals less about who is behind the wheel and more about the unfair bias in our minds.
The stereotype slides into our brains so smoothly that we don’t even realize it’s happening. What began as a humorous joke quickly turns into a racist, derogatory attitude towards every Asian woman driver we encounter while in a vehicle. This racist image of women drivers further deepens within our pop culture through references in popular TV shows like “The Family Guy” and “The Guardian.” According to Philips W. Chung, author of the digital platform “You Offend Me You Offend My Family” (YOMYOMF), “we are more likely to notice when a bad driver is Asian simply because we expect bad drivers to be Asian, thus reinforcing the stereotype” (www.npr.org). Gradually, we begin to see bad Asian woman drivers less as a stereotype and more as common sense. And once we start believing that all asian women are bound to be bad drivers, the idea becomes nearly impossible to uproot.
While this stereotype poses a grave matter for Asian women currently, it becomes increasingly threatening to future generations of girls before they even get their license. Early on, young Asian girls are becoming exposed to these racial biases and stereotypical judgements that many begin to believe it about themselves. In a study done in the National Library of Medicine, two groups of young women were experimented on, with the first group having a stereotypical threat and a control group with no study aim. Within the series of experiments on the young girls, the researchers discovered that, “as predicted, the results of both experiments showed that women under stereotype threat, as compared to either control or stereotype boost participants, doubled the number of mistakes.” (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) The study proves that these stereotypes directly correlate with Asian women’s driving capabilities and lowers confidence in their performance. Ultimately, we must break these ideologies so we don’t undermine the confidence of young girls before they even get behind the wheel.
The stereotype of “the bad asian women driver” is not just a harmless joke but a reflection of how easily biases can shape our perception of different people. What begins as a harmless comment progresses into a broader narrative that questions the capability and confidence of all Asian women drivers. These stereotypes of Asian drivers reduce individuals to mere objects that fit into these molded images, making ordinary mistakes further proof of their incompetence. Challenging these assumptions requires more than simply ignoring them and being silent. We must be more understanding of others and cultivate accountability. The next time you see a “bad” asian woman on the freeway, remind yourself that the stereotypes you stand by might be contributing to their performance.