 Hi, welcome to the State of Working America podcast where we seek to elevate workers' voices to ensure they're heard in the economic policy debate in Washington and beyond. I'm your host Pedro Ducosta and I'm pleased to be joined today by Rhonda Sharp. Rhonda is president of WISER, the Women's Institute for Science, Equity and Race, and we're going to talk about all kinds of fun stuff today. When we first met at the EARN conference in Pittsburgh, you used a term and I want to dissect it a little bit for our audience because you said you wanted to talk about data disaggregation. Tell me what you meant with that and tell me what you're trying to disaggregate. So when I say data disaggregation, I'm talking about not doing studies where we say women or we even say black or we even say Hispanic, but that you disaggregate women by the racial and ethnic groups. And ideally, I'd like to see it even more beyond that. So people will call it an intersectional analysis. I like to call it an intercess with an SES in the middle, meaning that you actually think about my socioeconomic status when you're thinking about analyzing the data. And the reason I think that that's important is when you aggregate women, the bulk of that analysis is going to be on white women who are roughly, you know, 60% of women identify as white, 40% identify as Asian, black, Hispanic, Native American, multiracial or other. So I think when you lump them together and you just talk about women, there are some nuances that you won't catch. And that's especially important when we're talking about policy, right? Like in order to have an effective policy, it's going to be based on the analysis that you do. So if your analysis isn't disaggregated appropriately, then you can't craft effective policy. So I like to kind of say selfishly what I really want is to read a report and see me to see me as a black woman, but to also see me maybe as a black woman who's educated and who doesn't have children and own stuff and not just see black women refer to reference to white women and it's deficit based or not to see me at all and it's just women. So that's what I mean when I'm asking people to disaggregate the data. And so if there's a deficit of data disaggregation, if you will, does that and does that deficit come from a lack of available data or does it come from a lack of effort on the part of economists thus far to break the data down in ways that would show the factors that you want to bring out? Sometimes it's both. So if I were to talk about the economics profession just really quickly, there is an organization called the Committee on the Status of Women in Economics Profession and they gather data on women in academic space. So they'll find out about faculty and they're found out about students. But when they ask department's information, they don't ask for race and ethnicity. So that would be an instance if you looked at their data, it's not available. But for the larger data sets, it's data is collected by race and ethnicity and and definitely if you're using the American Community Survey or you're using the decennial census or you're using the current population survey. All of that data collects on age, race, ethnicity, educational attainment. So I think when people aren't doing it, I don't think it's a matter of being lazy. I think that they just haven't really taken the time to really think about what they're missing when they're not collecting that data or they're not disaggregating the data I think in that way. Could you tell me a little bit more about why is there what your mission is, the story behind it and kind of what the goals are? So why is there the Women's Institute for Science Equity and Race? I think this is really important. Science is not STEM. Science is the social science lens. My goal is to expand women focused research, disaggregating data so that when you read a study, if you do see Black or Hispanic women, we won't be between the commas. So a lot of times it'll say women and then it'll be comma except like Black and Hispanic women or there'll be a paragraph and it's generally deficit-based. What I would like for our reports to do is just to talk about Black women and maybe compare Black women within Black women or do no comparison. Just put the facts out there. So we have a report coming out on custodial grandmothers and what I'm doing in this report is I'm going to talk about Black custodial grandmothers and they'll be compared to women who don't have grandchildren in their home and then women who have grandchildren in their homes but indicate no financial responsibility and I'll do that for each racial group. So no cross racial comparison. You'll just get to see how Black custodial mothers compare to their Black peers. And I feel like in that instance it's a comparison that shouldn't be deficit-based or it puts any particular race or ethnicity in quotation marks above another group. And it sets an entire different frame for which to study the issue. It does. So you were talking about Erne Kahn earlier and someone came up to me and she asked me if I had written how do you disaggregate this data and write reports so that you're not referencing a particular group and I was just like thank you for giving me more work right. So it is something that I'm going to have to think about. How do you plan that more broadly? And I think one of the places where we see disaggregation of data that is good and yet not quite sufficient is when the payday, pay equity day that comes around every year. I remember not this past year but the year before I tweeted out okay if it says women's payday right this is the equity payday then why do we have a Black I mean African American Hispanic and I think they do Native American right. If it's this equal payday for women then why do we have all these other days afterwards? So I think that when people look at equity payday you see women but you don't see one for white women but you will see one for African American women for Hispanic women, Native American women and then last year you actually saw one for Asian women. So you know that's that's sort of our goal to make sure that we are not women isn't synonymous with white women like to break that up and to recognize that women we come in a variety of hues and it's not just white. Absolutely and actually at the conference you talked about the issue you have with the term women of color and what it does to I guess not disaggregate some of the issues that you want to bring to light. Can you talk about that and how it's problematic? Yeah well okay so I think the first part is I'm not sure that people understand the originality of the term and as I understood from Loretta Roth and she has a really nice video where she talks about where the word comes from. It's meant to be a political term right and it comes out of the a conference that was focused on women in which Black women met in a hotel room and they were like okay here are our issues because we don't trust the larger conference to to actually think about us and then when we got to the conference it was other women non-white women were like yeah we want a piece of that and so the term women of color came to be non-white women uniting around their oppression. Unfortunately what I often see is rather than people identify me as a Black or an African American woman they'll call me a woman of color. There is so much erasure in that right calling me a woman of color as opposed to Black or African American erases all of my history in the U.S. and particularly in the U.S. and and I think when we're talking about the economy I think what does it mean when I'm a woman of color in my relationship with the economy right because Asian women don't necessarily have the same economic outcomes as Black, Hispanic and Native American women do so when you say women of color who are you talking about right so that's part of my problem it's a huge amount of erasure and it's not the way the term was intended to be used. Could you talk about examples of research that is exciting and that is you know breaking things down in ways that are enlightening and I mean you know talk more about the work that you guys are doing but also young researchers that might be kind of treading a new path and pursuing new things. I know there's a lot of young economists trying to do good work and trying to break out from the old kind of staid macro of your. I think Denea Franks who just moved to UMass Boston is doing some really exciting work around education. Terry and Craigie who is at the University of Connecticut and I'm sorry not the University of Connecticut, College is doing some work around crime and the impact of removing the box. Robin Cox who's in the School of Social Work at the University of California has for a very long time done a lot of work around incarceration and crime and and occasionally we'll talk about what that means for Black women Carrie Bruno and I think Carrie Bruno has something else on her name but she is doing a postdoc at Brown and she's been doing some exciting work on looking at teachers. There are quite a few those are the ones who really come to my mind who are more in academic spaces that I think are exciting but there's but the other part of that is when you're talking about Black women economists we're very very small groups so I just calculated the data for the degrees awarded in 2018 and we were something like 0.4 percent of all the degrees that were awarded and and and and while that's disheartening what really like made me go wow and I'll be talking about this tomorrow at Howard it's like 62 percent of the PhDs that were awarded were awarded to folks who were temporary residents right so women who were temporary residents were 22 percent of all the doctorates awarded their percentage is higher than white men which was 19 and and some people might say well why is that a problem well for me as a hashtag ADOS or American Descendant of Slaves I worry about folks coming to the U.S. who may be in positions of craft social and economic policies not having a full understanding or appreciation of my history in this space and I don't know what that's going to mean for our social policies when you have so few Americans who are native born who are being trained as economists right people worry about STEM the traditional STEM science technology engineering and math as a national security issue but for me economists who are not reared in the U.S. were not born in the U.S. and really don't understand our history crafting our economic and social policies that's frightening to me from a national security perspective and it also makes me wonder what kind of reports will have when we have civil rights challenges right so where do you get the studies that will show really how labor market discrimination is is going on how do you will you have the studies that will talk about the outcomes when you have inequality in education if you don't have folks who have an understanding of the American experience and not I think when you're a grad student here it's very different than having lived here and I think Stu Stokely who recently retired from eastern New Mexico state finds that for Hispanics going to high school here matters right that changes the perspective in terms of I think how they view just the whole all of the experiences of Hispanics in the U.S. right that just going to high school matters and so you know I think that those are the conversations that that we're not having and Iowa's economics profession would would think about that and have a real honest conversation that will lead to a definition of diversity because we're doing really well in terms of geographic diversity but I'm not sure that's in the best interest of the U.S. As a Brazilian American who moved to the States at 13 I can tell you that it makes a huge difference for my social justice understanding of the United States you know having come here at 13 and compared to like Latin American students that I met in college who had a completely by then they were already sort of completely you know boxed into whatever perspective they had in their national country and they weren't really trying to open themselves to like American social dynamics in the same way as one does at age 13 so I can definitely tell you makes a difference I also wanted to ask you about the pipeline research that you've done because it's not like it's not like we have this problem and we have also this problem of climate that that came out in the American Economic Association survey about you know women not feeling as as good as men about the profession and just general malaise in the profession but you've done some research on how it's not like the future looks that much brighter in terms of like who's entering the profession now right I and I think that depends on who you are right so my 2018 national economic association presidential addressed and and in fairness right I think that like many others I had been focused on who was being produced at the PhD level that I had not been paying attention to what was happening at the bachelor's level and what I found is comparing the the years 1996 to 2005 that 10 year period to 2006 to 2015 so taking those two 10 years and comparing them that for black women the growth in degrees at the undergraduate level was 47 we looked our growth looked like Native Americans and that's not a slight in Native Americans but they're one less about one percent of the population we're close to 12 and if you compared that to the growth for black men it was like 2400 and that just said to me what in the world is going on the economics profession that black women are not entering this discipline and and so my response to what the climate survey found that I think is something like 62 percent of black women say that they have experienced discrimination based on race and gender and I believe it's 58 percent for Hispanic women and I want to say 39 percent for Asian women but right at 50 percent for white so so women are saying like this is a problem but but my response to that was you could have looked at the pipeline right and and you could see that econ wasn't a welcoming space for black women like the pipeline was telling us that I think the challenges were so focused on who's getting the PhD that we're forgetting if they're not getting the undergraduate degree it's that much harder to actually get people to think about doing the PhD that's really interesting. Would you talk about the political environment today and and what it's like being a black woman economist under the Trump regime and how it differs from what it was like under President Obama? I have to say for me there's no different I ask the same questions and and you know I feel like this whether I have someone who's viewed as a racist in their comments or I think about Obama and when he entered into black space how he became very paternalistic right like I'm not so sure as a black woman either of them really matter for me I asked the same questions around race and gender inequality because under Obama or Trump I was about to say Clinton Bush I actually think it probably doesn't matter who's been the president I'm not so sure that race and gender inequality has has changed so my questions don't change depending on who who's in the presidency I think probably what has changed is that people are probably more I don't want to say excited but they're more welcoming about the data because he's president I think in a way that they may not have been with Obama because they felt like we had a black president you know it's a term that post-racial all was well now that we have Trump folks who're like oh wait maybe not so I think from that perspective but my questions don't change right the race and gender inequality it's not I think it'll be with us for a while and and I think that's less about who's the president and more about America and what America is really thinking about in terms of her citizens and making them and they're I think in their their well-being in totality and until that changes I don't think who's in the White House will fully matter so can you talk about the ways in which you feel unseen or unheard in the policy realm by not being you know seen or heard in the in the data so I'm gonna be completely selfish on this one like all about Rhonda and I think for me the biggest one is as a single woman I'm not married I own property and and I'm educated I provide what I think of is an enormous amount of support for my nieces and my nephews and that's both biological and then those adopted nieces and nephews but when I hear the conversation around tax breaks I never hear them talking about me right and even if you're not talking about single and black I don't even hear them talking about single people and I think that working families right yeah right it is it is working families um I find that term offensive not just because it excludes people who are not in family units but also because it excludes people who are out of work but anyway that's that point taken um I want I really want policies to acknowledge the the ways in which we contribute and so um you know my colleague or for us to say form a colleague and co-author Nina Banks will often talk about um the the ways in which black women collectively provide services to the communities stay tuned for Nina's podcast episode on this very subject um and and we you know and how much we do and if the government had to pay for that what would be the cost I would just like some way to to have a credit right for um and even if you're not going to give me a credit for it figure out some ways um that make it easier for me to to move economically right and and I don't think that our policies take that into consideration right they don't take into consideration the ways in which I subsidize so much of what um working families aren't able to do or that social services don't do right so a lot of people will talk about taxes and I'm like I can't afford to give more taxes right I have family members who are just on the cusp right they make too much money to get services but not enough money to do x y and z and so I'm paying for that so I can't I mean I don't feel the I don't want to give twice right I don't want to get to the federal government to take care of a population that when I look in my community is not being taken care of so I think that's one and then I think the other one that really really annoys me and there's a conversation about equal pay and as long as you're talking about women and the conversation is at the median and we're really not disaggregating this and I've got really old research that shows that as you get more educated the incidence of discrimination increases and it increases for everyone um but again it's exacerbated for for blacks and and and the less extent Hispanics and Native Americans right so even in that conversation when we talk about pay equity bringing me up to the level of a white woman or using her metric and to bring me up to equal pay folks as I remember the median that means that there's still going to be black Hispanic Native American and and as um my guests talked about for Asian American and Pacific Islander history month some Asian groups because we tend to aggregate them together as if they're they're a monolithic group and and they're not and so those are think the two that just worry me um the most in which I want to see myself and I want to see people have a real conversation and I'd even add to that like I want to see people even talk about not just the gender inequality but the intra gender inequality like the fact that white women and Asian women probably make more money than the rest of us but that's not a conversation that we have um the ways in which there's inequality within within the gender that's really fascinating so can you talk about uh we talked before the show about your uh your tepid faith in the political system to affect imminent change in progress so can you talk about the ways in which you see uh sort of different policy fights uh as as vehicles for you know for for empowering people is it is it unions is it uh is it activism what what is it what is what are the solutions that you're thinking about I think a lot of it is is is literally going to be activism and you know the one of one thing said that you know for all of the the grief that millennials get right they are amazed because they're not having a whole lot of stuff right like they got a list and you probably don't want to be on the list of what millennials aren't having but but I think more than that if you asked me earlier about the political climate and what's going on you know I've I've often asked people with respect to Trump's tax returns or with impeachment I want someone to tell me how that makes america better right as as I'm thinking about the resources that are going to be spent in an impeachment I think wow how much of that money right could be better used to make education better or how much of that money could you use maybe to even offset student loan debt or make college free and more importantly as we saw with Clinton there's no guarantee that if he you impeach him that Senate is going to vote to get rid of him so so I'm on the other hand can I make a you save money on the wall but but you know and that's interesting because I think for me I'm my attitude about the wall is if we're in the wall and ice is I think that we have become a society that's reactionary and not pro and so if Trump is sending ice out and the face that we see that they're rounding up tends to be fakes that we think about our indigenous hispanic folks so they look more mestizo um I think that we should be asking ice to do their job and if it is your job to round up folks who are here illegally then you need to go get folks who are here illegally not just those who look mestizo go get everyone you know where the white communities are right and I assure you if ice did that we'd hear no more conversation about immigration and ice because let's be realistic I think that there are white communities that will not have that they're not going to stand for that but that's not what we do we react to what what's happening and then as I was saying earlier you know the money that's being spent on on impeachment just tell me how that makes my life better tell me how that makes sure that affordable health care or changes to the health care policies are made tell me how you know with the number of hbcu's that are struggling how much of that money could go to make sure hbcu's are thriving I just I'm I'm not confident and I don't think that for me it matters who's who's president I just don't think that we're in a space right now where folks are really that they're really taking a moment to think I think we're sort of in this mob group think and we're not we're not being critical thinkers right and and a lot of what's going on you need to take a step back and critically ask yourself what does this do for the overall well-being of america right just tell me that not that you you want it done because x y and z did it but tell me what it does for the overall well-being of america fair enough I'm gonna leave it at that thank you so much thank you that was Ron the sharp she's economist and president of the women's institute for science equity and race and this was the state of working america podcast you can subscribe to our youtube channel or join us at epi.org slash podcast thank you so much for joining