Disaggregration Is Getting Me Aggravated

Slicing and dicing identity groups like an onion is the name of the game these days.

First published on LinkedIn

There was a recent publication about disaggregated specific Asian countries from the “Asian-American” category and then analyzing their representation in medical school. The TL;DR is that southeast Asian immigrants and their descendants are under-represented.

These types of articles (one of the Big 4)... I don't know what to do with the data. Of course I am supportive of broad representation of all Americans in medicine. I'm an immigrant and my parents were not physicians - in fact, I was the first ever even looking back 3-4 generations into India. So, let's get that out of the way.

But, let's look at a specific group, for example as the article mentions, Laotians. This community has faced so much strife in Laos and even when they come to America, life does not always improve to the standards of native born Americans. This is a real problem. I agree they are not coming from the same background as my parents. However, they make up 0.06% of the US population. If we had exact proportional representation, of the 97,000 American medical students, ~60 would be Laotian. And that is over 4 years of classes, so roughly 15 per class.

If one third are to choose a primary care specialty (5) that leaves 10 left for other specialties. Just mathematically, the vast majority of specialties will have zero Laotian students and that would be "underrepresentation". And by the same math, any specialty with Laotians would be strongly overrepresented (>0.06% of population).

I think the intention of these studies is lovely, I truly do. But what real world application do they have? The only way to actually improve these numbers is to have more immigrate to America. When you have such small 'n', these types of identity studies don't really help us fix real problems.

We need real solutions to real problems. Data like this does not help anyone.

Love you all,

Sim