"At some top companies, Asian Americans are overrepresented in midlevel roles and underrepresented in leadership."
The traits that are optimal or believed to be optimal for a midlevel role are intelligence, conscientiousness, and ability to fit in.
The traits that are optimal or believed to be optimal for leadership roles are the ability and willingness to play aggressively and intuitive or deep understanding of the behavior of other people.
Rather than this weird, face-blindness theory I would recommend taking a look at the intersection of culture, presentation, and stereotypes.
There's also the issue that it takes longer to climb to a higher position (even an entire generation), and the US was much less diverse a few decades ago. The "Hidden in plain sight" study the article cites [1] says executives are 80% white. While the US is currently 63.7% non-Hispanic white, that number was 80% as recently as 1980. It seems reasonable to expect a 40-year lag between arriving to a country, and reaching the highest corporate positions.
The article is frankly deceptive. The US is 4.9% Asian and 63.7% white. The study [1] found that executives in the tech companies examined are 13.9% Asian and 80.3% white. So Asians are 2.25-times as likely to reach an executive position compared to whites. But by comparing against their over-represented numbers among tech workers, the article spins this as discrimination. Look how they phrased it:
Another study, from 2013, found that while there were nearly as many Asian professionals as white professionals working at five big tech companies [..], white men and women were 154 percent more likely to be an executive than their Asian counterparts;
There were "nearly as many Asians as whites" in a company, but there are 13-times as many whites as Asians in the US! This is presented as a completely neutral, non-problematic fact, and that this over-representation doesn't reach even further is what was cast as the problem.
