Are Asian-Americans considered an "underrepresented minority" in academia in the US? As an Asian-American I sometimes feel as though I am &quot;stuck.&quot; There are certainly many Asian academics, but only a few Asian-Americans. This is complicated by the statistics. In absolute numbers, I think the numbers of Asian-American academics are small. Asian-Americans only make up a small percentage of the overall population of the U.S. (about 5%), and so from that perspective, a statistic that says something like, &quot;9% of academics are Asian-American&quot; (I made this up) can be regarded as saying that Asian-Americans are overrepresented.
At the same time, to my knowledge, I was the only Asian-American in my entire PhD program while I was there (not just my year - the entire PhD program), there were to my knowledge no Asian-American faculty in the department, and I can count on my fingers the number of Asian-Americans I see represented in my field.
(Edit: I also want to add that I understand that even the term &quot;Asian-American&quot; is messy because it lumps together several different ethnic groups)
There is no universal definition of &quot;underrepresented&quot; and also no universal definition of Asian-American, so it's impossible to answer this question accurately. A very rough answer is that it depends on the discipline (eg computer science vs anthropology) and also on which ethnicities are considered Asian-American.
Your personal experience notwithstanding, it is likely that Asian-Americans are overrepresented in academia overall, simply because Asian-Americans are overrepresented among Americans with advanced degrees. But this isn't a very useful metric from the point of view of diversity and equity.

Edit:
The NSF has a breakdown by race and discipline of US citizens awarded doctorates in 2016:
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsf18304/report/which-fields-attract-students/minorities.cfm
As for faculty, another reason it's going to be hard to find good data on whether Asian-Americans are underrepresented is that schools love to pretend that their faculty is more diverse than it is, so they often have rather creative definitions of &quot;underrepresented.&quot;