East Asians underrepresented in biopharma C-suites: report
29 January 2025
Despite making up a sizable chunk of entry-level employees at the biggest U.S. biopharmas, the share of east Asian Americans drops dramatically as you move up the ranks. That’s according to a report from ElevAAte Biotech, a new nonprofit that seeks to boost the biopharma C-suite representation of Americans who come from countries like China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
The report focused its analysis on companies with a market capitalization of $500 million or more. Of the 181 companies included in the full analysis, 7% of C-suite roles are held by east Asian Americans. But that number drops dramatically when you home in on the Big Pharma companies—just about 2.75% of those C-suite execs are east Asian American.
What’s more, east Asian Americans are far more likely to have become a biotech CEO by founding a company themselves—54% of east Asian American CEOs got the top job this way, compared to 27% of white CEOs.
The report is “confirming what we had all thought, but now we can actually quantify it,” said Ken Song, M.D., president and CEO of Candid Therapeutics and a founding director of ElevAAte.
Though Asian Americans as a whole make up one-fourth of entry-level Big Pharma employees, the report found, they only constitute 11% of C-suite executives. And an east Asian American has never been CEO of a U.S.-based Big Pharma, according to the report.
ElevAAte officially launched earlier this month and seeks to address the disparity in east Asian American leadership by providing a networking forum, holding leadership training programs both virtually and in-person and highlighting east Asian role models, including Song himself.
“I'm hosting a dinner at my house of a dozen or so what we call ‘rising stars,’” he said, “where there's an opportunity for them to network, to come together and ask me questions in a very sort of protected setting.”
Though he’s since learned to embrace his role model status, Song said, it was a bit discomforting at first.
“I have a lot of people reaching out to me, and a lot of younger Asians, saying, ‘hey, I would love to follow in your footsteps,’” Song said. “I was kind of embarrassed. I'm just a dude.”
Song began to notice the lack of east Asian representation in biopharma leadership after becoming a CEO for the first time in 2010—he co-founded Ariosa Diagnostics (since acquired by Roche) as a venture capitalist at Venrock and served as interim CEO before eventually taking the job full-time.
After chatting with other east Asian Americans in the industry who also noticed the lack of representation, the group got together for a retreat in Hawaii in August 2023. They then decided to create a formal group to address the issue, hiring Elaine Chen to serve as executive director. Chen previously worked as an events director at The New York Times.
Other founding directors of ElevAAte include Angie You, Ph.D., the CEO of Architect Therapeutics; June Lee, M.D., former chief operating officer of MyoKardia who also held several leadership positions at Genentech; and Chen Yu, M.D., founder and managing partner of healthcare investment firm TCGX.
Though the group is currently laser-focused on East Asian American representation at biopharmas specifically, Song said, they’d like to eventually expand to include other life science industries and other parts of the Asian American community, like South Asians.
“What I learned as an operator is to have the most impact you've got to stay focused and prioritize and be successful there first,” Song said. “Let's not bite off more than we can chew.”