Behind the Scenes: HOPE’s Economic Status of Latinas Report with Author Dr. Elsa Macias
The 2020 Economic Status of Latinas is the third report in HOPE’s report series which updates national, state and regional indicators on Latina economic progress compared to other major demographic groups. The report, released in October 2020, came at a critical historic moment as the United States and the globe face a three-fold crises of public health, economic recession, and social upheaval in the face of enduring racism. The report showcases ongoing demographic and economic trends that attest to Latinas’ increasing impact on business, education, political and government sectors; while demonstrating the effects of the pandemic on Latinas are exacerbating the opportunity gap that extends from disparities in educational attainment, barriers to successful entrepreneurship and a persistent wage gap that affects Latinas’ overall economic well-being.
We tapped the series’ author, Dr. Elsa Macias, to take us behind the creation of such an impactful report, the significance of building upon over seven years of Latina specific data, and what she hopes future research will show us about Latinas’ economic progress.
HOPE: Can you tell us about yourself, how you got into research, and how you became connected to HOPE?
Dr. Elsa Macias: I’ve always been the person asking, “Why?” I’ve always been interested in why things happen the way that they do and looking for trends, patterns, and connections. That’s really been a lifelong personality trait — I’m just always asking why.
That curiosity is also paired with an interest in learning and an abiding concern for my community as a Latina. When I talk about my community, I’m talking about serving my family, my relatives, my immediate community in my city or region, and, as I got older and went up the professional ladder, that sense of community just kept expanding.
As a researcher, I’ve been able to combine my curiosity and passion for knowing with helping my community. My background as a public policy analyst is the perfect intersection of my personal interests and my desire to make a difference in the world.
When I was younger, I was so idealistic and wanted to fix things in the world — fix all the wrongs — and it’s been really exciting that, as a policy analyst, I have a direct pathway to being able to do that by providing data to decisionmakers and stakeholders who can then do something with that information and make a real difference. It’s a really exciting way to combine my personality traits with my professional life and how I view the world.
I first became connected with HOPE while I was working at a think tank, as HOPE was one of the partners we’d informally work with. I joined the HOPE Leadership Institute (HLI) and was immediately floored by how much I was learning and the quality of my HOPE sisters. On the one hand, I’m a policy analyst, so I would look at the agendas and think, “I already know how to do this,” but I was learning in a very different way how to implement things I’d only studied or was doing without really thinking about it; it was a different type of training and development.
That’s something that happened several years ago, and through my work I continue to be interested in and involved with HOPE issues. I go to the annual conferences — I love Latina History Day. It’s one of my favorite events because it’s a tremendous opportunity to network, meet like-minded women who are making a difference, and I’ve been invited many times over the years to present as well.
The connection to HOPE has always been very strong, so when Helen Torres [HOPE’s CEO] came to me for the first ESLR [Economic Status of Latinas Report], I was available, interested, and knew HOPE could do amazing things. I’ve often been on volunteer boards for different nonprofits, and one of the things that’s very important to me is that the funds provided by community members, foundations, corporations, and others are used in a way that is fiscally responsible and always thinking about the ultimate mission, and I’ve always been impressed by how much HOPE did with its resources. There’s just so much passion and love for the community, and the extent of the network is used in a way that is always focused on the mission: how can Latinas be empowered? How can we make a difference for ourselves, our families, and our communities? So it was a no-brainer to be able to participate since I had that opportunity.
HOPE: HOPE has counted on your research and authorship for all three of the Economic Status of Latinas reports, how did the initial report come about? What was the situation at the time that evidenced the need for such a report and how has it developed over the years?
EM: The first report came out in 2013. We were just a few years out of the great recession of 2008, so there were still people who were in a lot of economic pain. There had been a lot of financial disasters, the housing crisis and people losing their homes.
It occurred to Helen that we needed to have a better idea as to how Latinas were faring several years into the recession, so she approached me. The first report was a baseline for understanding what Latinas in California were experiencing at the time and how some were beginning to dig their way out of the adversity they had experienced. We had no idea what we’d find at the time — it had just been several years of all this horrible news and we suspected that the Latinx community had suffered more. We also suspected, but didn’t know, that Latinas were really still hurting. So we were looking at the median earnings, poverty rates, home ownership rates, just trying to understand what Latinas in California really look like.
We surveyed Latinas at various HOPE events and conferences to understand not just what the data were telling us but to hear directly from women how they were faring through the recession. We couldn’t have predicted the kinds of things we would find, just how great the impact had been on Latinas.
One of the things that came out of the decimation and the financial issues was that Latinas are resilient and truly optimistic; even at the worst of times, they believed America would come back. They had a tremendous belief that things were going to get better for them regardless of how much they had already gone through and that they had the opportunity in the U.S. for progress and making things better.
There were also good things happening in education. We were confirming Latinas tended to do better on educational metrics and we could finally start to see the promise of that progress. The date were very interesting and sobering, but also hopeful, even then. When the second report came along, we were able to get a much better look at what had happened through the recession and how Latinas had come back strong.
For the second report, we focused on defining the characteristics of different types of Latinas, what Helen called the HOPE Sample. In the first report, we just had baseline statewide data, and it wasn’t as detailed in region differentiation as the second one. We also found that some Latinas were doing extremely well, even during the recession, so we wanted to see what was happening for them. What does a millennial Latina experience differently than a Latina professional looking to retire? How are they different, and how has the recession affected them differently?
On the note of their resilience and optimism, many of them had turned towards microbusiness ownership when they realized they had no other options. We weren’t able to see that well in the first report, since it was in the middle of the recession, so it was something that wasn’t really clear until the second report, when we could very clearly see what had happened.
It turned out that, when Latinas saw no job opportunities or ways to feed their families, they became business owners, and in many cases microbusiness owners. That ended up being not just a way for them to increase their household income but it turned out to be a way for them to really flourish personally as well. There was a tremendous lack of information and a lot of frustration, because, as many other research reports had discovered, the Latinx community was much less likely to have access to credit and to the kind of funding other business owners could get, but there were also opportunities for better training, resources, and information that we ourselves needed to become better business women that we wanted to access.
Out of that second report, Helen realized we needed to dig more deeply into what’s happening with business owners, so we did a focus group study just on what’s happening, what’s important, what matters, and what are the issues for Latina microbusiness owners.
When Helen came to me [in early 2020] and said it’s time for a third ESLR with a focus on education, it seemed appropriate because we were in a much better place economically. We knew that women were doing much better on those financial metrics, and we wanted take a look at the opportunity gap in education, which is persistent and hasn’t gone away. The first report had baseline metrics, and we added more as we went into the second one and, for the third report, to really hyper focus on the education issues.
The third and latest report represents the biggest examination of what Latinas are going through because we examined all of our previous metrics and added a bunch of specific education metrics. Helen was really where it all started, since it was her brain child and inspiration to look at this. I, as the researcher, just told her what we could and couldn’t do, facilitating her vision. I was the researcher, but Helen was the inspiration and guided the whole report, all three of them, based on what she was hearing in the larger political and policy ecosphere. Without her inspiration, these reports wouldn’t be nearly as interesting or informative for Latinas as they turned out to be. It’s a very substantive partnership.
HOPE: Take us behind the process of creating the ESLR. Where do you start? What are some of the sources you look at first and how do you decide to pursue one source over another?
EM: The first thing I generally do is review my previous ESLR reports to see what I did already and what I’m going to be leapfrogging from. I say, here’s where I am, what was missing in previous reports or maybe what data weren’t available. I go back and look at prior reports and go through lists of datasets that I keep. Because this is every 2–3 years, I’m just reminding myself what I did last time, and then I start doing a lot of reading, because there’s been a lot of new research and reports since then.
The ESLR reports are broad in scope and I’m not an expert on some of the areas, so I’ll turn to colleagues and say, this topic isn’t my area of expertise, what are the major reports and issues I should look into. I identify the landscape then and now. What do I know, and what do I know less about? Where do I need help, and where is Helen asking me to dig deep that I don’t know much about and need to figure out ways to get myself up to speed? That’s where the reading and reaching out comes in, to see who can help me to access this information.
Then there’s this strange time that a lot of researchers go through, where I spend a lot of time that looks like I’m not doing much. I’m just pulling data, taking note of things, noticing things, and then it seems like there’s something interesting happening with the wage gap. It’s not just that there’s a wage gap for women, but there’s this massive wage gap for Latinas. Then we look at what’s happening regionally and I think of cost of living and increase in the numbers of enterprising Latinas. You make connections and form a picture, develop these themes, and that’s where I write a few bullet points, one or two major findings, or I might actually start to write the entire report. I originally have two or three major findings, and that’s where the wage gap issue came out of — I just start to see something interesting.
So, if Helen were to say, “Can I see where you are? It’s been a month,” I wouldn’t have a report to share! It wouldn’t look like a report, just a smattering of stuff. This can be a little bit stressful, because I’m trying to collate all of this data and understand what is it telling us, what it means, and why policymakers and stakeholders should care. That’s the analysis part, the meat and potatoes of these reports. The meaningful part is what gets to how we might be able to take these hundreds of data points and make them into something that might have a real effect on women’s lives.
Then, the real writing starts to happen, as I start to put things together. It gives me the opportunity to discover the gaps. I start with the US Census and the American Community Survey, and I also go through the US and California Departments of Education. I keep running lists that I update before and after each of these reports. Sometimes it’s just dozens, possibly hundreds, of different resources, such as the uninsured rates, associates degrees awarded to all women in the US, data for age pyramids, how much disposable income women have, homeownership rates, and other datasets.
One of the things about research is its extremely labor intensive; sometimes you’re in the weeds and going down the rabbit hole. It could be 4 a.m., and I’m down a rabbit hole trying to locate something or asking myself if this particular data point mean what I think it means. I lose track of time and everything, because I have what you call a flow. It’s crazy, but it’s also exhilarating, because you’re on the chase, searching for something, and you know you’re onto something really important. I’m always thinking about the impact I’m going to have on women, of course, but in the moment it’s the curiosity of “I need to track this down.”
When I can track down data that is interesting and actionable, that stakeholders could grab ahold of and do something with, there’s a tremendous sense of satisfaction that comes with that.
I also have the privilege of working with HOPE’s Deputy Director of Communications and Research, Maya Gomez-O’Cadiz. She is a tremendous asset and a sounding board that lets me think about the way I say things and how to have them make more sense. Research can be a lonely enterprise, but it’s not done well alone. That’s what my process looks like. It’s different for different researchers, but the big picture is probably fairly similar.
HOPE: What are some of the greatest challenges or gaps in information you have come across in looking at Latina-specific data?
EM: Two things immediately come to mind: the first limitation is my own as a researcher. I’m one person, working on a report that covers a lot of different content areas. So I have to own my limitations to make sure that the report won’t suffer as a result. So I turn to a lot of colleagues, ask for help wherever I can. It’s important as a researcher to understand we can’t do it all and can’t know it all, especially on a wide-ranging report like this.
I think the main challenge that we’ve had all along with all of these reports is the lack of data that are disaggregated by race/ethnicity and gender. For the first ESLR, it was just incredibly frustrating. I might be able to get data that was disaggregated by race/ethnicity, so we might know what the high school graduation rate was for Latinos in general, and we might even be able to get that at the US and state level, but we couldn’t get it disaggregated by both race/ethnicity and gender, so we couldn’t know what it was for Latinas or for Latino men. Then add to that the geographic issues. I might be able to get some data for Latinas, but it was only available at the national level. One of the ways we got around some of that is that we had the survey, so we had input from hundreds of women across California to fill in some of that data that we didn’t have.
But even though we wanted an ESLR on the status of Latinas in California, I realized there wasn’t enough data for Latinas in California to always present a good picture. The other thing we did was bring in national data as context; we often would say, here’s what the picture looks like for Latinas nationally, and here’s what it looks like for California. It made the report a little more unwieldy, but it was necessary as there just wasn’t data disaggregated by race/ethnicity, gender, and geographic region. That was especially frustrating for the first one. Even just as a researcher that was frustrating; that the Latino community was already so big 10 years ago, and that there wasn’t more data as to what was happening in this population that was already so big and was poised to get even bigger and bigger.
If there’s so many people, why aren’t we looking more closely and disaggregating this population to see what they look like. Because Latinos in California look very different from Latinos in Florida or New York City. There are differences in country of origin, recent immigrants, and the numbers of undocumented and non-citizens. It’s different, and having to make due with national data doesn’t address the nuances that happen in California. We also know California is kind of a harbinger of what happens across the country, so all the more reason to know what happens in California.
In the second one, I start to see a shift as more and more data was available, especially from government sources that was disaggregated. But still, it was not as robust as it needed to be. I remember, after the second one, I told Helen that by the next report we’d see a big difference, because I was already hearing conversations that the government is collecting this data this way, so we knew the next time there’d be better data available, and that was the case. We’ve had a lot better luck with data disaggregated by race/ethnicity, gender, and geographic region, so we had much better success with this last report, which is why it was ok that we didn’t have the survey. We didn’t have to try to figure out what was happening with women because we had more of the data.
That said, there’s a lot of work to be done. My frustration continues that we’re such a large proportion of the population nationally and, in California, 39% of the population, and we still don’t have a lot of data disaggregated the way we need it. The other thing that I am looking at is what’s happening regionally in California; just as we know Latinos look differently across the country, they look very differently in California. How do you compare large groups of Latinas in the Central Valley to very densely populated areas like Silicon Valley or Los Angeles?
HOPE: The ESLR is created every 2 or 3 years, what do you hope to see/be able to report in the next 3 years?
EM: If you had asked me this question in February, I would have said, and might even now say, I expect tremendous strides in educational achievements and homeownership rates for Latinas. Latinas are very enterprising, and I expect that’s going to continue to be interesting. I am hopeful that finally there will be some major movement to narrow the wage gap. All of that said, I’m very interested to see how all these metrics are going to be affected by the economic and social policy of the last few years, the recession, and the effects of the pandemic.
The one thing we saw huge strides for was in educational achievement. I am very concerned of what’s going to be happening for the Latino community generally, especially for younger kids, and I just don’t know what to expect. I’m hope there’s a continual improvement on educational achievement over the next few years, but I do worry about what they’ll look like once the effects of the pandemic are really clear.
One thing I know is that all the research I’ve looked at demonstrates that Latinas are if nothing else resilient and optimistic, and we are survivors. I know that even though the research shows Latinas have been the hardest hit demographically here in California, they’re not going to just give up. They’re going to find ways to feed their families and be successful. And I suspect that, just as they turned to small business ownership after the last recession, we’re going to see a surge in business ownership for Latinas in the next few years; it’s probably already started now.
You can access all of HOPE’s reports on the status of Latinas at www.latinas.org/reports.