PRB

Transcript

Diana Elliott, moderator: Hi everyone. Thank you for joining. Welcome to today’s today’s webinar on writing about population research for non-scientists. I’m Diana Elliott, Vice President of U.S. Programs. Though this webinar was organized by the Population Reference Bureau and the Association of Population Centers, with funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

I’m pleased to introduce four speakers to today’s event. Shannon Monette is the Lerner Chair in Public Health Promotion and Population Health at Syracuse University, and we’ll cover some of the benefits of writing research briefs and examples of impact at the Lerner Center. Following Shannon, we’ll have Beth Jarosz, Senior Program Director; Paul Scommegna, Senior Writer; and Mark Mather, Associate Vice President, all in the U.S. Programs department at PRB. And we’ll be providing some additional guidance for writing briefs and bridging the research and policy gap.

We’re going to save the Q&A till the end, and we encourage people to use the raise-hand feature in Zoom and to unmute yourself to ask questions. So for those of you who aren’t familiar with where this is in zoom, if you go to reactions at the bottom of the screen, you’ll see that there’s a raise hand feature under that reactions tab. The webinar is also being recorded and will send you a link to the recording and the slides in a few days. Closed captions are also available. Participants can turn on captions by selecting the Show Captions option from the Zoom control bar. Now I’ll turn it over to Shannon.

Shannon Monette: Thank you, Diana. Welcome, everybody. I’m looking forward to the conversation that we’re going to have today about writing population research for non-scientists, in addition to being Lerner Chair at Syracuse University. As Diana mentioned, I’m also the director of the Center for Policy Research here and a professor in the sociology department. And we have two brief series, one through the Learner Center and one through the Center for Policy Research. And they’ve both been quite successful. So what I’m going to do is, um, provide a motivation for writing briefs. Presumably you all think that it’s important and that’s why you’re here. But I’m going to give you a few reasons why I think that, um, writing policy and research briefs can be really exciting. Uh, I’ll talk a little bit about the purposes of and audiences for these briefs. I’m going to provide a couple of overarching tips about structure. In a couple of examples. Uh, Paola will cover more detail later about some tips for writing effective briefs. And then I’ll finish up by sharing some examples of how some of our briefs have resulted in broader attention, uh, or impact that that’s been really exciting.

Uh, so first, why might we want to disseminate our research to nonacademic audiences or non-scientists? Well, one reason is that it’s just super fun. Um, I think it’s way more fun than writing academic papers or presenting academic talks, because you can be more free in your language and your style. You can be provocative. Um, it provides the opportunity to meet different kinds of people that you might not otherwise meet and interact with. Another good reason is to help break down barriers between academics, between scientists, and between the public, and show people outside of academia that what we do can be relevant and is relevant to their lives. Um, it’s also an opportunity to show the public that we’re people to into to help build trust, which is particularly important during an era where there’s declining trust in academics and experts. Another reason is that your dean, your department chair, your research center director, your parent, your partners can use it to show off your work. Um, provost and deans love this kind of stuff because it’s really easy for them to share with donors. Um, and rather than an academic article which can be 40 pages or even longer if you consider the supplementary materials, these short 2 to 3 page briefs or something that you know the dean can share with alumni or with their advisory board members, your parents might read these things too, like mom probably isn’t going to share your academic article with their friends, but she might post your brief on Facebook. Another reason is that it’s a way to get really timely findings out more quickly than an academic journal, you know? We all know it can take forever for academic articles to come out. Sometimes we’re working on time pressing issues, and we want people to know what’s happening right now, so it’s a really good outlet for that.

Um, briefs can also get you research into the hands of unexpected audiences. It can launch unexpected opportunities. I’ll talk about some of our successes and those unexpected opportunities at the end of my presentation here. Um, and of course, these things can generate a lot of impact. They may… They may actually be your best shot at someone paying attention to and using the hard work that you’ve done. Um, academic articles are behind a paywall. They’re long, they’re dense, they’re difficult to get through. But briefs and things like op eds even get to main points quickly so they can have a lot of impact.

Uh, and so in terms of like, what are the purposes of research briefs or policy briefs and who are the audiences? Well, the purpose of briefs are to translate your findings and disseminate your findings in publicly accessible and easily digestible formats, toward some purpose, towards some action. So that purpose or that action might be to enhance knowledge or raise awareness. It could be that you want to change hearts and minds about some topic. It could be you actually want to change behaviors or practices. Um, or it could be that you want to influence policy debates. Um, the audience for these are varied. I think it’s, it’s somewhat important going into the writing that you have a target audience in mind. So your target audience may be policymakers at the national level, the state level, the local level. Um, your audience may be practitioners. If you’re writing about health care, for example, um, your audience may be reporters. A lot of faculty actually use these briefs for their undergraduate classes. So the audience may be students and the audience might also just be the general public.

Um, what I like to tell our authors when they’re writing briefs is, would your uncle Bob understand what you’re writing here, what you’re saying here? Um, so in terms of writing style, these audiences are important to keep in mind. Just a few words about brief structure. Paola is going to discuss a suggested approach for writing briefs for PRB and a checklist of things that they consider at PRB, but I thought I’d quickly provide some suggestions for how you might think about structuring a brief. And here I’ve just provided an example of our brief template that we use at the Syracuse University Center for Policy Research. Generally, policy briefs or research briefs, um, summarize 1 or 2 main findings or big picture takeaways. They’re not bogged down with a lot of detail or nuance. Is this 1 or 2 big things that you want your audience to know? They’re usually 2 to 4 pages. Sometimes they’re one page. They’re definitely not 20 pages. Briefs are, as they’re called, very brief. Um, they should provide a short intro of the problem and why your reader should care about this problem. Our briefs, we have the authors provide 1 or 2 main research findings, include visualizations if possible. Pictures are worth a lot. And also our briefs include implications for policy. And I know that that PR, er, PRB’s briefs do as well. Now, what you don’t see here is theory, a lit review, or a lengthy data or methods section for our briefs. We do include a very short data and methods section at the very end. Um, they’re very short, and we just sort of just describe what the data set is, the, the years that are represented, the sample size, and maybe a couple of sentences about variables. But then we direct the reader to a published journal article, if there’s one that exists from which the brief is, is summarizing findings.

So just show you a couple of examples from brief series here at SU. So, this first one is a brief that was led by my colleague here, Jennifer Karras Montes. You can see it’s just three pages. It provides a nice snappy title: Democratic erosion predicts rising deaths from drug poisoning and infectious disease. So, it gives the main takeaway right there in the title. It includes a couple of key findings so that if someone only read those key findings, they would know right away, uh, everything they need to know about that. The takeaways of this brief, you’ll see there’s a short introduction about the problem. Um, there are a couple of really easily understandable figures in here. And then at the very end, there is a section about what should be done about this problem. What are the policy implications? And in this section, we ask our authors to be concrete to identify the actors. Um, they’re not the place where you advocate for future research. They’re the place where you advocate for changes, for policy or practice. And I think you can be provocative here. Um, it’s okay that you didn’t study a specific policy. You’re the expert. You can speak to what you think the implications are of what you found.

Here’s just another quick example. This one is from our Center for Policy Research brief series. Again, similar sort of format. We have a snappy title, key findings, um, an easily understandable figure, a couple of sections with a little bit of information about the findings and then, um, what the policy implications are here. And so again, just notice the title and notice the headings. They provide statements about the key takeaways and the conclusions. I wanted to just quickly give you a couple of examples, um, of the difference between academic writing and public language. Okay. So, the way that we’re trained to write for journal articles is academics is not the way that we want to write for public audiences. In fact, I would actually say that I would prefer the writing for public audiences, even for academic journal articles. But, um, people might fight me on that. So, the academic text here is on the left, the public brief text is on the right. And this is from an article that, uh, coauthored with some colleagues here at SU. And you can see this lengthy academic text, um, we’re using technical language in it, things like controlling for confounders, estimated models, um, county and state level data, just all kinds of technical information that a public audience may not understand or care about. Compare that to the short end text from the brief, and we’ve condensed all of that academic language into a very short sentence that says what this brief does in very clear and simple language. It’s much shorter, it’s much simpler, and it still delivers the intent of the research. We also present visually results differently in academic publications versus briefs. So this is just an example of how we converted a complicated technical table of our findings into a simpler figure that tells the exact same story. The table, you’ll notice, uses terms like counterfactual and IMR, which is the infant mortality rate. The figure just shows different minimum wage levels and number of infant lives saved at each different level of minimum wage, so it provides the same information but in a simpler format.

This is a similar example from a paper in a brief written by Andrew London. Another one of my colleagues here at SU. And this table shows a lot of numbers with various symbols. This is from his academic paper. There are odds ratios in here. There are confidence intervals and p values. Um, which is great. This is what we want for academic papers and this is what reviewers demand. But for the brief, the bar chart shows simple probabilities of the outcome. Much easier for a policymaker or reporter or for your Uncle Bob to understand and digest.

So I’ll finish up just by talking about some successes that we’ve experienced from our from our brief series. We’ve had lots of media attention from places like NPR and CBS News and New York Times and in many other outlets. Um, we’ve gotten attention from the public. So random readers will write in to our authors to thank them for writing the brief. We get a lot more of those than we get, like, the nasty emails. Those happen once in a while, too, depending on the topic and how controversial it is. But we get a lot more just random, you know, my daughter experiences this thing. Or thank you so much for writing about this. Or like, what do you think about what’s going on with this thing? And in my city, um, we’ve also had attention from policymakers. So one of our, our graduate students here in the Lerner Center, for example, wrote a brief a couple of summers ago that that ended up being shared with a staffer for a New York state senator here. Uh, and from that, our student was invited to testify at a New York State Senate subcommittee hearing on aging, which was really exciting for her. Of course, um, one of our Center affiliates has been asked to participate in congressional briefings and give Senate testimony as a result of her briefs on veteran food insecurity. And you never know when, when this kind of thing might happen. It doesn’t happen with all briefs, but I think it’s more likely to happen with briefs than with, with academic articles, because they’re so accessible and easily digestible and people can read them in a couple of minutes there.

Um, there are also unexpected invitations and benefits that come from, from writing briefs. And I’ll just give you an example from my own experience, one of the very first briefs I ever wrote was for the Carsey School of Public Policy at University of New Hampshire, and it was on rural urban differences and adolescent opioid misuse. Now, that brief was based on a peer reviewed, published journal article. So I had the article published, and then one of my colleagues, Ken Johnson at Carsey School, said, you know, why don’t you turn this into a brief? He, he had done a lot of these and had a lot of success. So I wrote this brief. They published it through the Carsey School. And then that led to an invitation to attend a conference at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna, Austria. Like, these people paid for me to fly to Vienna to give a presentation on this, this topic that I was doing research on, not because they found my academic journal article even though it existed, but because they found my brief. Um, so it was, you know, a really exciting opportunity this, you know, working class kid from rural upstate New York gets to go to Vienna, Austria, which was super cool. And I’ve had similar experiences from other briefs. So I wrote a brief while it was at Penn State on, uh, deaths of despair and support for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. And that led to a lot of media attention. But it also led to, um, this research director from this organization called the Institute for New Economic Thinking calling me up and saying, we want to give you some grant money to study this topic more. It’s, like, unheard of. It doesn’t happen. People don’t just call you and say, we want to give you money. But, but he did. And in addition to, you know, that that grant that I got to conduct more research on that topic, that organization also paid for me to, um, to go to Trento, Italy, and to Edinburgh, Scotland, to give presentations on this topic.

So again, you never know when these things are going to happen. Um, it depends a lot on the topic. It depends on who sees your brief. But I think that these types of opportunities on anticipated benefits are more likely to happen when you’re writing in a style that’s accessible for people outside of academia. So I’ll just leave you here with a couple of examples of other media coverage from some of our Lerner Center briefs, and I’ll go ahead and turn this over to Beth. Thank you.

Beth Jarosz: Thank you. Take me a minute to switch sharing screen. And we did this into our run. So, if you can’t see my slides, please let me know. I’ll assume silence means it’s okay. Um, and Shannon described there being a barrier between research and sort of the wider public, whether it’s policymakers or the public or journalists, and I’m going to describe it as a gap. But, essentially, we’re talking about the same problem. And I think I wanted to start with, um, you know, a focus on public policy specifically because most of my career has been in informing elected officials and policymakers about data so that they can make good decisions.

So I’m going to focus a little bit on that policy piece. And when I say public policy, I mean a set of actions, plans, laws, behaviors that are adopted by a government and that can be enacted through things like agency guidance or court decisions, executive orders, funding priorities, policy documents, laws, legislation, rules, regulations and so on. So that’s the angle I’m going to take. In talking about that, the really good news is that evidence can matter. Um, and as Sutcliffe said in 2005, the bad news is that often it does not. Um, and so let’s talk about some of the reasons why that gap exists.

Um, there is a deep communication gap. And I think a piece of it is different languages and different skill sets. And I’ll talk about that. But part is also that stereotypes are part of the problem. Um, so before I go on to the next slide, I want to ask each of you to take a moment and picture a policymaker. Think about the words or the phrases or the sort of emotions that come to mind when you think of someone who’s in elected office. And, and when we have asked this in the past, um, we get things like that they have very limited perspective, that they distrust research. Or if people are feeling less generous, that policymakers don’t understand research and that they are the ones who are responsible for digging up evidence and data to inform their policymaking, that their actions aren’t evidence based, and all of these have the sort of undercurrent of that policymakers are partisan. Um, which may be true in some cases, but in my career, I’ve worked with a lot of elected officials. And even when we don’t necessarily agree on policy or policy ways of achieving things, um, I think that there is a lot more, uh, appetite for having evidence informed public policy than I think sometimes they get credit for. And of course, policymakers may have stereotypes about researchers. Things like excessive use of technical jargon, um, researchers and journal articles, in particular, being very general and theoretical rather than the sort of real world or real problems that policymakers are dealing with day to day. I use if you can’t see, I use real problems, in sort of air quotes, but that that is seen as a gap between the two worlds and that researchers tend to avoid policy. I know those of us who are in the research world, um, we don’t want to assume causality when we’re when we’re looking at data where there’s a correlation. Um, and so therefore there can be an interest in shying away from policy implications when what reason, what policymakers need are those policy implications or implementations. And sort of the summary in one word of that, of that series of stereotypes is sort of the tower piece.

And all of that said, it is possible to bridge the gap between researchers and policymakers. And I’ve got a couple of practical examples of how to do that. Um, longer term and sort of fodder, perhaps, for a different workshop is thinking about that research uptake and engaging policymakers up front. Um, but what we’re going to do today, just in the interest of time, is focus on that third piece about communicating strategically. And if you take nothing else away from what I say today, I would say: assume competence, but not expertise. So assume that the person who’s going to be reading it is smart, but that they’re not using the same terminology. They don’t have the same depth of knowledge about the theory. And what their goal is, is to be educated in order to make good policy decisions.

So how do we do that? A couple of a couple of tips are to use clear and concise language and avoid jargon. Um, and what I’m going to, uh, offer to all of you is an activity. I know we’re going to take Q&A at the end, but if in the chat you could type some jargony terms that you use. Maybe there’s a term that’s very specific to your research. And those of us who are here can start to give you alternatives, but we can be your sort of live thesaurus. So if you have a term like etiology, um, maybe we would respond with the cause of disease and use that phrase instead. Um, if you regularly use a phrase like externalizing behavior, um, it could be aggressive, impulsive, or antisocial behavior. Replace it with, um, so thinking sort of about the jargon that we use can be challenging, um, but one of the tips here is write what you would write academically and then go back and, try and go back and use a thesaurus and sort of work those words back out again so that your work is more accessible to a policy audience, like, so, um, Go ahead and type those. If there’s a key, a term, a jargony term that you use that’s really important to your work, type that into the chat. And Mark, Paula, Diana, and maybe Shannon can live give you examples of what you could replace that with. A couple of, a couple of suggestions coming into the chat. So, I will let people keep working on that and move on to the next sort of two, uh, tips for work for bridging that research to policy gap. And it speaks directly to issues that policymakers care about and provide information that allows them to feel confident taking action. I’ve grouped these two together, um, because, you know, we, we as researchers might think there’s a really compelling arc about sort of the, the life-saving implications of an investment or the, the sort of social, emotional well-being of a particular marginalized group is the most important thing. But you need to know your audience. And so if, if you’re talking to a set of policymakers who, what they’re going to care about most is the budget implications of something or the fiscal impact or whether or not it brings jobs to their community, it is okay to make that the primary selling point when you’re making your policy case. It’s not pandering. It’s not disingenuous. It’s meeting a person where they are with the issue they care about.

You can and think, think about one of the more polarized issues, you know, uh, diversity, equity and inclusion. I think most of the people on this call probably care very deeply about that. But if you start out with that in a talk with someone who has been sort of socialized to resist, that they might not hear anything else that you’re going to say. So maybe start talking about, more generally, human interest, maybe talk about fiscal impact, and then you can sort of lead into those other issues, um, that might have been more sensitive before you built on that report. Just, and in terms of providing information that helps them feel confident taking action, give them data that they know the sample size is big enough. You know you’re not going to put a whole literature review in there, but you can signal things like a wide body of research also finds that this policy matters, um, you know, or study after study shows that if you do X, Y will happen. Um, you don’t have to do a full lit review to signal that they can feel confident that if they take this policy action, there’s going to be an outcome at the end that they expect.

And then, last but not least, um, propose with that solution is, and Shannon alluded to this when she did her overview. What is that concrete action step that they can take? Is it expanding a program? Is it making a budgetary change? Is it funding, um, additional health care services? Make it clear what the ask is in your writing and what the outcome is going. And so with that, I am going to turn it over to Paola to give you some specifics about how to write a brief working in those cases that I’ve talked about in terms of adding some more.

Paola Scommegna: Thanks, Beth. What I’m going to do is share some very specific techniques, um, that we use at PRB so you can recognize them and really understand the reading, the reasons behind them. And the first thing I want to share is it’s crucial to understand the, the differences between academic and journalistic writing. Academic writing, um, builds to a conclusion, starts with background, findings, and the conclusion is at the end. Next slide. But journalistic writing turns that format on its head. It’s called the inverted pyramid, and the most important information is shared first. Generally, that’s the conclusion. And then additional evidence and background comes later. And this format is used in newspapers, but also in writing for the web and policy memos. And this is what people are very used to reading. So as you begin writing for non-scientists and are aiming to communicate in a non-technical way, I would almost I would encourage you to go sit in a different desk or have a picture of your audience there so that you can think of this totally different way of communicating. And next slide. Oops.

Beth Jarosz: But I apologize. I have no idea what just happened to my computer.

Paola Scommegna: All right, well, the next one is, is on, um, writing headlines, and, um, let’s see if we can get to it. There. There we go. Okay, so these are some tips on writing headlines. It’s the first thing that you’ll do, and what we suggest is you state the main finding clearly like a newspaper headline. You may describe the action needed. You may aim for about 20 words, and it must have a verb. So, next slide, will give you some examples. And, and these examples are from recent population research. And what I’ve done is I’ve highlighted some of the verbs in red.

So you can see that these have verbs, and there’s action here. The first one: U.S. Teenage Births Hit Record Lows and Could Drop Further if Contraceptives Were More Accessible. It outlines the findings of the research, and it also implies the implications of the research. The next one was on, um, describes a natural experiment: When High Schools Moved Start Times to After 8:30 a.m., Attendance and Test Scores Rose. Um. I, very. The main message is right there. The third one is, um, looks at some pilot studies or small-scale research on, um, and the finding is: Taxes and Health Warning Labels on Sugary Beverages May Help Limit Consumption and Improve Health.

Um, next slide. And so the next thing we suggest is you begin writing with a summary of the main message. Now, Shannon shared how you can break that into three bullet points. Um, and, and, and that works quite well. And what we suggest is try to get it in the first paragraph. Um, clearly state the main problem or issue. Summarize your main research findings. Name the implications for policymakers and these three things together. Answer what we call with each other the “so what?” question. Why should people care about your research? Why should they be interested in what you found?

Um, next slide. So, this is some research out of Penn State that does that in the first two sentences. Um, the main finding of the research is the first section. The first sentence, Children in households that receive federal rental assistance are healthier and miss less school due to illness than those whose households are waiting for help. The research is summarized there. The second sentence, however: Up to 75% of renters who need federal housing assistance, including public housing or rental vouchers, don’t receive it. So the problem, the issue, the why people should care, is right there in the second sentence.

Next slide. So, here are some style tips to keep in mind. We talked about jargon with Beth, that, be conversational, and one way to do that is once you’ve written something, is to read it out loud and make sure it sounds like how you speak. The second thing is to define acronyms and technical terms. For example, if you write on the EitC, you need to say “earned income tax credit,” and then in, include a few words to explain what that is: lower, middle and lower income workers tax bills. Um, and that’s certainly how you would talk with someone who isn’t familiar with the acronyms that you use often.

Third, um, write in first person. I. I did this. We investigated this. And that will help you use active voice rather than passive voice. So, you would say, “we surveyed a representative sample,” rather than “a representative sample was surveyed.” And the reason we’re so fussy about passive voice is that it’s not conversational. It takes all the action out and the actor is unclear. And so it’s something we strive to avoid in the, the things we publish.

Finally, insert citations as numbered end notes. You saw that in the pieces Shannon shared with you, and you’ll see it in the pieces on the PRB website as well.

Next slide. Um, subheads. What are they, and why use them? Um, they’re descriptive phrases with a verb, and they’re really important. They break up the text. Highlight the main points for a reader who’s skimming, and research shows that many of us are skimming, particularly when we’re reading online. It. They reinforce the main message and they provide signposting. They signal to the reader what to expect in the text in the following section.

So, next slide. So what I did here was I pulled some subheads out of a brief so you could see them separate from the text that follows them, and can see how they summarize the main messages. Um, and this piece was on parental incarceration and its impacts. Parental Incarceration Is Widespread and Taking a Severe Toll on Children’s Lives. When a Parent Is Incarcerated, Children Are More Likely to Develop Behavior Problems, Face Homelessness, and Experience Harsh Parenting. Those are the research findings, in brief. The third subhead, um, points toward the action. The policy implications: Screen Students for Parental Incarceration, Rethink Sentencing Policies. So, it’s a succinct way to communicate your, your findings and, and the main message of a piece and keep the reader going through your piece, even if they have a tendency to skim. Um.

Next slide. And now, um, finally, I have some advice on data and graphics from PB. We find that bar charts and maps are much better than tables. We aim for no more than 8 to 10 data points. The title should be non-technical and have a verb like a headline. Xs and Y axes is clearly labeled. Use whole numbers if possible. And next is a sample of a PRB figure in PRB style. And the first thing I want you to see is that the, the main title is in more conversational, less technical style. Female, White, and Highly Educated Older Adults Were Most Likely to Feel Lonelier During the Pandemic. But below it, we include a much more technically accurate description for people who might want to know more specific things. So that is there, too. Um, the, um, numbers are whole numbers. The axes are labeled. And look what we’ve done here with the colors. They are designed to help you, uh, help a reader look at what we want them to focus on. So the first two bars are age, the second two in another color or gender. The third are, um, race/ethnicity, and the fourth are related to education. So, the colors work to focus the communication as well. So, I’ll stop here and pass it over to Mark.

Mark Mather: Right. Thank you, Paola. I wanted to end just by talking a little bit about how PRB can help, what we’re, what we’re trying to do to, um, help you write your own research briefs. And so the last thing I wanted to mention in this, uh, in today’s presentation is that we have a, a new research brief series with the Association of Population Centers where we’re helping researchers. Uh, well, there’s two different options. Uh, one is that you draft a research brief, and we can assist at PRB with editing and production of that brief. Or if you prefer, we can draft a brief, a research brief on your behalf. The, um, we’re aiming for, for about a thousand words for these briefs, which is pretty typical. Uh, we try to include some simple interactive charts, and we’ll publish these, uh, materials on previous websites and share them through social media. And Lillian, you can see, just put in a link in the chat here. So this is where you can find a sample template that’s available. It shows you, uh, the basic structure for one of these briefs and as well as provide an example. And then there’s also a short online form that you can fill out if you would like to have assistance. Lillian, just put that in the chat as well. If you don’t want to fill out the form, you don’t have to. You can just send us an email and we’ll be sure to respond to you. Um, there’s no cost to you for this work. The only requirement is that the topic really needs to be related to demography and/or reproductive health and population health topics.

So, in the next slide, I just wanted to provide a list of some of the new and forthcoming research briefs that we have at PRB. The first three are currently available on our website, whereas the other, I guess five of them, are currently in production. So those have been drafted and they’re in the process of being copyedited. And just so you know, it does take a little bit of time to produce these. There’s a, you know, we want to make sure we get the data right. So there’s a fair amount of back and forth with the researcher. And then it goes to our communications team for copyediting. So, the whole process can take, um, sometimes 5 or 6 weeks, sometimes a little bit longer than that depending on people’s schedules. And you can see that these briefs are on a wide range of topics. Um, we’ve got briefs on, recent briefs on marriage, child care, coastal hazards, and gender norms.

And then I thought I’d end the next slide. Just, um. I think there’s one slide before this one. Beth. There is not. So yeah, you can just go to the next slide. But I don’t know what happened to this, the intervening slide. But, um, I thought I’d end with this because, um, this is an example where PRB wrote a research brief and, um, it ended up being picked up for a maternal mortality awareness campaign last year. And it’s, it’s, so it started with a research brief that Paola had written, and we’re really proud of this one, because it took a lot of work to, um, to work with the advocates who were organizing this campaign. There was a lot of back and forth to make sure that they were representing the NICHD-funded research. So we wanted to make sure that everything was, was accurate. Um, and, you know, not everything that we publish gets a lot of attention. But if you keep working at this, you’ll find that, um, you can have an impact. And again, um, Lillian has just shared the link to this, uh, this brief and the related materials on our website, and I think I will stop there, and we can open it up for questions.

Diana Elliott, moderator: Right. Um, so. Just to remember, as part of the Q&A, um, we’re going to ask people to use the raise hand feature and then to jump in and ask their questions when they have them. Um, raise hand feature is at the bottom as part of the reactions, um, tab at the bottom of Zoom. Um, but we have a couple of, of questions that have come in. Oh, great. Alex, Kaylee, I see your questions. I’m going to ask the ones in the chat, and then we’ll turn to Alex and then Kaylee for their questions. So, we had one question come in through the chat, which is, what is the optimal timing for composing and publishing a research brief to mitigate potential copyright issues with journal article publication. Anyone want to jump in and, and speak to that one?

Shannon Monnat: I can, um. I suppose because we publish these briefs all the time, we don’t have any problems with, with copyright, um, concerns. And this is because you’re not actually reproducing the journal article. You’re summarizing the findings from that paper, if you have one. Um, and you are not copying and pasting the figures, for example, from the article, you know, we’re reproducing the figures to be more inclined for a public audience anyway, it’s your work. So there’s no, there are no copyright infringement concerns in terms of the best timing. If these are briefs that you want to pair up with an academic journal article, and for example, you want to link the journal article into the brief which, which I would recommend, um, I would suggest drafting the brief after you’ve gotten a revise and resubmit on your paper, or it’s pretty clear that it’s going to be accepted. Maybe you’ve gotten a conditional acceptance to have it ready to go so that once the, you know, you’re sending the proofs back to the journal, um, you have this brief done, and all you’re really waiting for at that point is the link from the journal article that you can embed into the brief. But if for some reason you don’t do that, that’s not to say that you can’t publish a brief after the article is already out. Um, this happens a lot with our authors, where they have an article that’s come out, they decide they want to write a brief. It’s targeted to a different audience. So it’s not like you’re missing out on anything if you don’t have the brief done right away. That’s, that’s my $0.02 on that.

Diana Elliott, moderator: Thanks, Shannon. Um, I’ll jump to the next question, um, which is, what platforms have you been most successful with reaching different audiences?

Beth Jarosz: I can, I can probably take a first crack at that. And I think we all probably have different perspectives. Um. I have found two things to be particularly helpful. One is social media, I’m assuming this is social media platforms, um, X before it became a terrible place to be. It was very effective for communicating with journalists and sharing information out. Um, I also am in the, the sort of unique position of I regularly present work to elected officials because of some work I do here in California. So I’ve got, like, a very direct line here that I don’t think counts. Um, but LinkedIn, weirdly, can be a good place because you’ve got an audience that is, uh, sort of issue focused, can be a really good platform to share. Um, and outside of that, one-on-one communications, you know that nothing—I know we’re talking about writing for these audiences, but, but nothing really beats building a relationship with whether it’s a policymaker. And again, I kind of mentioned this in the beginning to think about how to engage policymakers early on. If what you really want to do is policy change, start building those relationships, personal relationships, early on. Same thing goes with journalists that nothing beats knowing the person on the other end of the email.

Diana Elliott, moderator: Anyone else want to chime in on that one?

Shannon Monnat: Our briefs are indexed in Google, and I presume yours are as well. And actually, most of our hits come from that, from people doing Google searches. So we, we, we post the briefs and all the outlets that Beth mentioned. And, you know, we’ll get hits on those once in a while. Um, but when you look at the, the download statistics, most of it is from people doing Google searches because those terms kind of pop up at the top. Um, so, you know, just making sure you’re publishing with a brief series that does index on Google is a good strategy.

Mark Mather: I’ll just add, it’s, it’s good to have some, it’s okay to publish these in PDF format. But um, if you do that, it’s also good to have the short blurb so that people can find it easily, so they don’t have to take that extra step of opening up a PDF. I mean, that’s what social media is all about to you want to get people to see it first, and then if they if you get their interest, then they might click to see the whole thing in a PDF format. But as a general rule, we do now publish all of our briefs in HTML format so that they’re easier to search and easier to find.

Diana Elliott, moderator: Right. I think I’ll switch to, uh, folks with their raised hands. Alex, do you want to chime in and ask your question?

Alex: Sure. Hi everyone, thanks for holding this webinar. It’s been great so far. My question is related to, I think the question was just answered, but I wanted to know basically like, you write a brief, how does it get into the hands of a journalist or, or one of these people? And I understand there’s these research series, but do you contact journalists as well? Obviously, like you use your social media presence, but are there any other tricks to kind of get it in front of people? Um, and, and yeah.

Diana Elliott, moderator: Paola, I wonder if you have some thoughts on this.

Paola Scommegna: Um, it really helps that they’re, um, indexed in Google so that when a journalist is writing on your topic and they do a search, they find you. But I also follow who’s writing about the things I’m writing about in, um, in the national media. And I will send them something, um, through the, the addresses they provide, say, the aging reporter at the New York Times. I, I do send them things. Yeah. Usually, I’ll compliment them on something they’ve written and then saying, you might be interested in this.

Beth Jarosz: So excellent strategy. The only thing I would add to that is that if there’s a particular writer who you really hope will take up the article, if you can send them an early draft before it’s live and they feel like they have an exclusive, they’re more likely to respond favorably.

Diana Elliott, moderator: Not always a guarantee that they will write, though, and sometimes that’s very disappointing. Um, but they’re also, they’ve got other competing demands or editors who have opinions as well. So, um. Anyone else want to chime in to that or should I switch to Kaylee? All right. Let me switch to Kaylee’s question. Kaylee, do you want to chime in? And I’m sorry if I’m not pronouncing your name correctly.

Kaylee: Nope. That was spot on. Um, thank you all for your presentations today. It’s been incredibly helpful. I’ve just been taking notes frantically. So, my question is, um, pretty demography specific, but one of the things that I would love to hear about your experiences with or best practices is in terms of, um, when you’re trying to express uncertainty with your results. So, I’m thinking about, in the case of, for example, like demographic forecasting, um, or modeling in that way where, you know, you might have a point estimate, but what you really want to convey is like, here’s the possible range of outcomes. Um, how do you ,how do you manage the, the balance between like being honest to what your results are actually telling you versus wanting to tell this compelling story?

Beth Jarosz: This is, I, this is what I do all the time. So a, a big piece of my work is, is doing forecasting work for regional governments in California and um. I would say, where I started my career, point estimates were the only thing that people wanted to talk about. And now, particularly in the post-COVID context, there’s an appetite and an interest for having uncertainty ranges. Um, and I have had no problem just being really clear about that. Like, here’s the point estimate we’re going to use. And then here’s how widely it might diverge at the end. And um, really appreciated and no challenges with, um, sort of understanding among that policy audience.

Diana Elliott, moderator: Shannon, do you have anything to add based on your experience?

Shannon Monnat: Um, there, there’s a sociologist who wrote a journal article a few years ago with the title that said “eff nuance.” And the point was like, you’re going to get your point across much more clearly if you provide, you know, like not all kinds of little ifs, ands, or buts about what you’re trying to present, but you just say it straight. Um, having said that, I agree with Beth that it’s perfectly reasonable to just provide a range to say, you know, like our estimates suggest this is going to be the number. But because this type of projection can be uncertain, the range might be between x and x. And just say it like that. But what I would avoid is, um, all kinds of details that are things like, well, under this conditions, this thing happens, but only for this group and only on like Mondays. Right. So, um, then you have way too much detail and nobody really knows what to do about it.

Beth Jarosz: Yes to all of that.

Diana Elliott, moderator: Do we have any other questions from the audience? I don’t see any other raised hands. Um, and there was another question that was asked, but I believe it was already answered through the course. Yeah. Winnie, would you like to go ahead and ask your question?

Winnie: Yes. Thank you. So I wanted to know, can I, can a policy brief be publicly based on someone else’s research and not necessarily my own?

Mark Mather: Wait, you’re talking about, um, summarizing someone else’s research in a brief.

Winnie: That’s right. So, uh, without necessarily being the first author or whatever, like, you just find an interesting research and then you want to turn it into a book.

Mark Mather: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s, it’s good to, um, you know, the first thing you would do is probably just reach out to that person to let them know that you’re starting this process and because they will be important, uh, an important reviewer, we always send out our we we’re always writing briefs based on other people’s research. And, um, we send it out to them to make sure that we’re getting it right. And they like they also like to have, uh, they like to know when it, when it’s being published to so that, uh, in case somebody does come across that they’re not kind of taken by surprise when they get a call, um, that they, you know, a journalist just found this, this brief, and they want to talk to somebody about it.

Winnie: Great. Thank you.

Diana Elliott, moderator: Jan [German pronunciation]. It’s good to see you.

Jan: Good to see you, too. Thanks for the great presentations. Um, I was wondering if any of you had any, any experience with using a, AI to get a policy brief started, and if that is helpful.

Shannon Monnat: No, but that’s a great idea. I think I am. Part of me wonders. You know what I would spit back if you put in, you know, the abstract of a journal article and said, please simplify this using non-technical language. It might spit back something that could get you started. Um, and then once you’re started, it’s easier to, to proceed because it would probably identify what the most important parts of that abstract were for you. It’s worth giving it a shot.

Mark Mather: I agree. And there is one of our colleagues at PRB is using, I think it’s called a PDF or something, where you can upload a paper and ask it to pull out the key points. You can query AI for whatever you want to know about that paper. And I do think in some years’ time, you know, this business of writing my technical research briefs, we might be out of business when AI becomes much better at this. For the time being, I don’t think there, the, you know, I think that people can still tell the difference between one of Paola’s briefs and something that ChatGPT created, but who knows in ten years.

Diana Elliott, moderator: I still think there’s going to be a place for people, technical people, to review things. Well, I hold on to that, that hope for the future. Um, so, uh, I wonder if we have any other questions. Um. If not, I’d like to just sort of turn it back to the panel, and we’ve heard a few, I’d like to leave this on an uplifting note, right. We’ve heard a few, sort of tales, of success stories. I’m wondering if, if people want to chime in with some other success stories, to kind of inspire folks to write their first policy brief.

Beth Jarosz: You want that from the panelists? Or do you want anyone who’s participating to also share if they’re interested? Right, I think.

Diana Elliott, moderator: Yeah, I was thinking of the panelists, but yeah, we can absolutely open it up if if other people have success stories.

Beth Jarosz: Um, I would say in this sort of relates to the forecast question that was asked earlier. Uh, there, I wrote a brief about population decline, um, in the United States, that population growth has slowed dramatically in the wake of the pandemic, um, had been slowing leading up to that. And, you know, new Census Bureau projections show that we’re going to reach an inflection point at some point, certainly in the next several decades, if not in the next couple. So, I wrote a blog summarizing that, and a, a journalist from The Economist reached out and said, hey, I saw this blog you wrote. Would you be willing to talk about population change? So, it’s that, um, not every article you write, not every blog, not every policy brief, not every research brief is going to get picked up, but it’s having that sort of base of articles that are out there that gets you into the universe of the journalists that might be interested or the policymakers going to be interested. And then that builds. Now that journalist knows that, you know, I’m a resource for issues about population change and, and may come back to that again, you know, a year from.

Diana Elliott, moderator: And you developed a budding relationship with that journalist too, which is also really helpful. So, when Beth has something new out, she’ll send it to that journalist. And, and it helps. Um, Shannon, you had some great success stories. Not many people get to travel to such fabulous places because of their research. Um, I’m wondering if you have anything else to share on that front.

Shannon Monnat: This is the reason I keep writing briefs. I’m like, who’s going to send me on a trip next? Oh, it’s, uh, it’s so random, you know, like, I, I, um, I probably shouldn’t say it’s the reason I keep writing briefs. Because you shouldn’t write the briefs to get this kind of attention, because most often it doesn’t happen that way. So this idea that you’re building up this portfolio, that you become the go to person on this topic, that’s more likely to happen if your research is out there in the public, easily findable, not behind a paywall. When a reporter is looking for someone who’s an expert on X, you know, population projections for Beth or, you know, rural mortality. And in my case, they’re going to be more likely to find me through a brief than through a, through a journal article. And then these kinds of things happen, which can be exciting. And then you have to start saying no to things.

Mark Mather: I was just going to quickly use Paola again as an example because she, she drafted an article, I think it was 2019, Paola, the one on measuring longevity. So it’s pre-COVID, and it’s just an example of uh, if you, if you just keep producing these things, some of them will become very, uh, widely used. So when COVID, uh, happened the following year, that article started to get a ton of attention and ended up with several hundred thousand views in the first six months of 2020. So, um, so sometimes you might not get attention when you write the brief, but when certain current event, uh, policy, you know, issue comes around, it will start to get attention.

Paola Scommegna: And Mark, I was thinking of something you worked on a related to the burden renters feel or experience, and you gave data for every state, I think. And the governor of New York kept mentioning it, it just keeps turning up. Um, so there’s something you did a while back that’s driving policy.

Diana Elliott, moderator: Right. Um, hopefully that gives a little bit of inspiration for everyone on the call to ,to write, um, a policy brief, whether using AI or not. We support this completely. Um, and we can’t wait to read your briefs or to help you out with that, as Mark referenced before. So, just a reminder that this webinar has been recorded and there are slides and that link for the recording will be sent out afterwards. And I want to just thank everyone who participated who chimed in. Special thanks to Mark, Shannon, Beth, and Paola, um, for their terrific presentations and we look forward to being in touch.

Transcript

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: I just want to welcome everyone. I am Jennifer Gerson. I’m a reporter at the 19th, an independent nonprofit newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy. And I just want to thank you all for joining us today. I’m really excited about this webinar, which is being recorded, where you’ll learn more about the Population Reference Bureau’s new report, Losing More Ground Revisiting Young Women’s Well-Being Across Generations.

First, Diana Elliott, who’s vice president of US programs at PRB, and Martha Sanchez, the director of health care policy and advocacy at Young Invincibles, will introduce their organizations and why they came together to present this webinar today. Next, we’ll review the report’s key findings. And then lastly, I’ll introduce our very impressive panel of experts and begin the Q&A.

If you experience any technical issues, please comment in the chat and we will try to help you resolve that as quickly as possible. And now I’d like to toss things over to Diana and Martha.

Diana Elliott, PRB: Thank you, Jennifer. And thank you also to everyone who’s joining us today. PRB is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit research organization focused on improving people’s health and well-being through evidence-based policies and practices.

When we started the research for our new report, Losing More Ground, we knew from our previous 2017 report that young women’s well-being had stalled, but we didn’t expect the declines we see in the findings. Through original data analysis, we compare women ages 25 to 34, or the Millennial generation to same aged women of the Gen X, Baby Boom, and Silent generations. We find that generational progress has declined even further for millennial women in the intervening years. While Gen Z is not yet of age to include in our overall index, our analysis finds that teen girls ages 15 to 19 show early signs of both progress and decline relative to prior generations.

Much has changed since our original report. Since 2017, the US has had two new presidents, two impeachment proceedings for Supreme Court justices, widespread social and political movements, reckoning with racial disparities and health, safety and opportunities, the overturning of federal reproductive health protections, and the COVID-19 pandemic, to name only a few changes. Our findings show that women’s generational progress has been impacted by how the world has changed.

The findings in Losing More Ground have serious implications for the young women of today and tomorrow. And when we thought of how we could best draw attention to them, it was important to us to partner with an organization dedicated to young people’s well-being. We are pleased to co-host this event with Young Invincibles, and for Martha Sanchez to say a few words about this organization.

Martha Sanchez, Young Invincibles: Thank you. Diana. I’m Martha Sanchez, the director of health policy and advocacy at Young Invincibles. We are a national nonprofit organization dedicated to the economic well-being and empowerment of young adults ages 18 to 34 when it comes to their access to higher education, health care, workforce and finance opportunities, and civic engagement, all of which are issues that are touched by this report.

Um, so we are very excited and thankful to be here and grateful for everyone who is joining, especially the young adults who are highlighted in this report. I’m sure you all have plenty to say as well and contribute to this discussion, and we look forward to hearing your ideas on how we can move things in the right direction. Thank you.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: And now I believe, uh, Sarah Shrigley, who’s the research analyst at PRB, is going to share some of the key findings from the report.

Sara Srygley, PRB: Thank you, Diana. Thank you, Martha. Thank you, Jennifer, and thank you all for being here today. It’s something of a tradition, debates between the generations about who has had it worse. And this conversation comes around so reliably with each new generation that we may not always take it very seriously. But when young women today say that life is harder than it used to be, we now have the data to prove it.

The promise of generational progress has been broken for millennial women, and in many ways, Gen Z girls are already seeing similar trends as they near young adulthood. You can see in this figure that while Baby Boom women saw a sharp rise in overall well-being relative to the silent generation, their progress was more slight. For Gen X, it plateaued briefly for Millennials in 2017 and is now notably in decline.

So what’s happening to millennial women?

Despite all their efforts, today’s young women are faring worse as serious threats to their health and safety are driving this overall decline in their well-being. But let’s start with where things are going. Well. Millennial women graduate high school and attain bachelor’s degrees at rates far outpacing previous generations, making them more educated than at any point since at least the Silent Generation.

And Millennial women aren’t just more educated than ever. They’re also working hard to make gains in their professional lives. They’re more represented in high-earning and often competitive STEM fields and among business owners today than in previous generations.

And the gender wage gap has narrowed from one generation to the next, although it does still persist, as you can see here. It’s even more pronounced between women of color and white men.

When it comes to political representation, the share of women holding office in state and congressional legislation has increased with every generation. As Gen Z comes of age, we’re beginning to see a whole new generation taking a seat at the table of political leadership and civic engagement.

And young women today are also avoiding key risk factors to their health, like cigarette smoking, teen pregnancy at a higher rate than peers in previous generations.

So all of these data tell the story of a generation working hard to obtain their personal and professional goals. And despite all this progress and more, which is detailed in our report, why are Millennial young women still faring worse overall when compared with their mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations?

A key part of this answer is difficult to accept: A young woman in the U.S. today, between the ages of 25 and 34, is more likely to die than at any point since at least the 1960s.

Maternal mortality rates have dramatically increased between Gen X and Millennial young women. In just a few years’ time, this rate climbed abruptly by nearly 60%. And women of color, particularly black women, are disproportionately impacted by these sharp increases.

And suicide rates have also risen, driven by increases for women of color. In fact, during the 2018 to 2021 time period, the suicide rate actually declined for white young women by about 6%. But disparities for women of color drove this overall pattern of worsening suicide rates.

Homicide rates, too, have taken an alarming turn for the worse, and there are racial disparities here as well. The increase has been particularly stark for Black young women, who are five times more likely to die by homicide than their white peers.

We’ve seen that young women today are doing many of the things they’ve been promised would lead to a better life, and these are things that worked in the past. Yet the evidence from our analysis shows that despite their best efforts, they still face very real challenges compared with previous generations in some of the most fundamental areas of life.

How we address these threats to millennial women’s well-being will set the stage for how Gen Z fairs as they reach their young adulthood, and whether they see a restoration of the promise of generational progress. Now I’ll turn things over to Jennifer to begin the Q&A.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: Thank you so much, Sarah and Diana and Martha. I’m really excited to engage with the other members of our panel right now.

We are also joined today by Kara Brumfield, who is the Director of Income and Work supports at the Center for Law and Social Policy. And Doctor Jamelia Harris, Senior Director of Research at the Justice and Joy National Collaborative.

So I’m really excited to speak with you all and, um, about all the things that Sarah just shared with us. You know, when it comes to education, Sarah just talked about some real wins for Millennial women with high school dropout rates declining and bachelor’s degree attainment rising. But at the same time, we’re seeing overall well-being decline for this generation, both over the last few years and especially relative to other generations.

You know, Martha, I was wondering if you could start off for us. What do you make of knowing that more Millennial women are accessing more education, but still facing worse outcomes, especially when it comes to their health and mortality?

Martha Sanchez, Young Invincibles: Yeah. Thank you for this question. I think the report, um, highlighted, um, that it is still so important to attain higher education in this country. The average salary, uh, for a college diploma is around $61,000, compared to 21,000 for the high school diploma. Um, and so when I think about, though, the experiences of young Latinas like myself, um, and first generation, um, Latinas, um, I have to also consider the fact that many of these higher education institutions, really all of them were not built for us. And so the challenges that we face throughout these academic years, um, definitely influence, um, the health outcomes that we have throughout our higher education experience as well as afterwards when we graduate.

And we see that when it comes to our mental health as well as the financial outcomes, um, financially, even with a college degree, women earn less, um, than men. But women of color continue to earn much less than white woman or, um, white men. And so when you have these disparities, it’s going to affect our ability to build wealth, because we realize that we have to work ten times harder. Um, and even then do not really receive equality or equity when it comes to our earning potential and income.

But that also takes a toll on our mental health, because there were so many sacrifices made along the way from our parents and our family and ourselves to accomplish these goals, these milestones of college graduation, for example, that when we see the reality and when you face all of these challenges, um, it is very it definitely takes a toll on us. And I think an example of what we see on, on college campuses, uh, when it comes to mental health, you know, half of young adults 18 to 25 deal with, um, depression, depression or anxiety.

And in the report, it’s all young women. Um, for almost 40% of them deal with anxiety and loneliness. Um, but on college campuses, we don’t really have the resources. We don’t really have the counselors available. Um, the mental health resources. Why? I we are pushing for a federal designation of campuses that meet, um, a healthy mind standard of of providing resources to students, um, both when it comes to in-person or telehealth, uh, or peer to peer. Um, all of these resources would make a difference in their ability to actually cope with the challenges that before them, especially first generation Latinas and African American students, um, who need these, need these resources in order to actually thrive when it comes to higher education.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: Thank you so much for that. You know, to kind of continue this, take this to the next step, just like you were talking about. Martha, when we look at indicators where Millennial women are doing worse, we saw some pretty stark contrast between outcomes for white women and outcomes for women of color. You know, especially oftentimes when it came for black women and native and indigenous women.

Doctor Harris, I was hoping you could tell us about what this data tells us about how we understand equity in this conversation when it comes to understanding outcomes, and what kind of policies do you think could really help address this gap we’re seeing?

Dr. Jamelia Harris, Justice and Joy National Collaborative: Absolutely. And first and foremost, I want to thank the report authors for intentionally centering, uh, disaggregate lens that, uh, presents the data across race, age, and gender. And, and as a researcher, I don’t take that for granted, as oftentimes we see that, uh, there is an incomplete story when we don’t have this disaggregate this, this aggregate lens that, uh, really helps us to understand the particular challenges faced by girls and women of color in society.

And, uh, I want to just start out with foregrounding that a lot of the patterns of inequity that we see reflected in the report, uh, are really connected to deep seated histories of racial and gender inequality that girls and women of color have been facing for centuries. Discriminatory policies. Institutional practices have created deep-seated inequities across sectors, including education, health, the criminal legal system. And so, uh, some of the data points that we see, uh, that really are highlighting and illuminating the inequities that women of color, uh, face can really be contextualized by understanding this history.

And so I did want to flag a few data points that for me as a Black woman, uh, were particularly stood out, stood out as concerns of equity for women and girls of color. Uh, one of them being that black women saw a 16% increase in suicide rates during this time period. We also saw that even while educational attainment and incarceration rates improved among young women, overall gaps persisted based on race and ethnicity. And I think that these gaps that we’re still seeing, uh, for women of color, particularly for Black women and Indigenous women, really point to how the compounding of oppression due to race, age, gender create unique barriers and challenges for women of color and these data points also really underscore the necessity of what Black feminist scholars have long been calling, uh, as a need for us to prioritize intersectional lenses into the ways that we are addressing our policy solutions.

And so what that means is that our analysis, our policy solutions, should put the people who are the most vulnerable to being harmed by systems and structures due to their location at the forefront, um, of the initiative. And just as we can’t see these inequities without a disaggregate lens, we also cannot address, uh, the specific challenges that women of color are facing without a lens that addresses their race, their age, their gender, and the compounding effect that that has on their experiences in society. And so I would say that while we have a long way, um, while we have, I have to acknowledge many of the strides that this report presents.

We still have a long way to go until this vision of racial and gender justice are actualized. But that work must come from, uh, intersectional and intergenerational policy solutions that are for fronting the people who are most harmed by these systems and structures.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: Thank you so much, Doctor Harris. It’s really important context to keep really top of mind in this conversation today. You know, to move this even, you know, forward even more. We just, like you were saying, talking about health and mortality components that we just heard about in the data, especially in terms of this really jarring increase in maternal mortality rates, in the suicide rates for women of color.

You know, to the whole panel, I was hoping to hear from, you know, anyone who wants to jump in, what relationship you see between the increase and the maternal mortality rate, the increase in suicide rates and the increase in homicide rates among millennial women, and whether we need to think about all these things as separate issues or how related these things are, especially when we start to break down the racial divide we see in the data.

Cara Brumfield, The Center for Law and Social Policy: I’m happy to start. Um, I think one through line there is definitely, um, mental health. And we know that millennials face really unique, um, challenges, including economic challenges like coming to age and entering the workforce during a recession. Really oppressive levels of student loan debt, housing costs, job insecurity. Um, all of these things, uh, create a really stressful, um, stressful life. And that weighs on your mental health. Uh, we also know that domestic and intimate partner violence and gun violence both increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as social isolation, which Martha also mentioned. Um, and those things, of course, have mental health implications as well.

Um, and we also know that Millennials are experiencing just, uh, a unique set of social pressures. Um, we have delayed life milestones, like having children. So we’re having children later in our lives, which makes having children, uh, more risky from a health perspective. Um, but we’re also facing the dual pressures of society to make a family and be educated and have a successful career despite the economic environment that makes all of those things really hard to do. Uh, and, uh, you know, we have data that shows that pregnant women, 18 to 44, since about 2014 have shown, uh, 30% increases in major depression, hypertension, type two diabetes.

All these things are risk factors for maternal mortality. Um, but we can’t talk about maternal mortality without talking about the experiences of women of color, um, and women experiencing poverty, but especially black women who face systemic barriers to high quality care. Doctors do not take Black women’s pain seriously. And the data shows that wealth is not a protective factor for Black women when it comes to maternal health and mortality. Um, and we’re not really going in the right direction. So, for example, right now in Mississippi, which is one of the most dangerous places to give birth in the U.S. Um, officials are making changes. Officials are sort of failing to make changes to Medicaid that would allow pregnant people more timely access to prenatal care. And we know that that early access to care is really critical for health outcomes.

Martha Sanchez, Young Invincibles: Um, and I can add to this as well. Um, when we look at where we are today, we see that, um, there are policies at the state and federal level that are actively dismantling our ability to have agency over our own bodies and make decisions over our own health care, whether that is by straight out, um, bans on abortion across the country, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, or by the fact that for many of us, we simply cannot afford our health care services, especially when it comes to mental health. Um, so, you know, there are multiple causes, um, and stressors that are affecting our mental health. Everything from these, uh, the, these policies and the lack of agency that we have over our bodies.

But then even when we take the most courageous steps someone can take, which is to ask for help when it comes to our mental health, we find that: A) we can’t afford it because who can really pay a $90 co-pay per session per week? That’s just not realistic financially. Um, and B) there are not enough, um, culturally competent mental health providers out there. And oftentimes insurance plans and companies get away with ghost directories. Um, which means that, you know, they’ll say that they have in-network providers within a 20-mile radius, and then you find out that actually they no longer take that insurers and no longer afford it.

Um, so we are really failing our women when it comes to protecting them, protecting their health, um, their ability to seek help, whether it’s reproductive care, abortion care or mental health.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: Thank you so much, Martha and Cara. You know, while we’re kind of talking about these economic factors and the toll they can often play, I was hoping we can give some more context to folks on that.

And, Diana, I was wondering if you could tell us a little about what we’re seeing right now with kind of the state, you know, the state of the union of the economy. We saw poverty rates decrease during the pandemic, and they’ve recently bumped back up again at the same time, young women’s labor force participation is at an all-time high.

So, Diana, if you could just talk to us a little about what’s happened since the pandemic in terms of both women’s labor force participation and the poverty rates and the way you kind of saw that iterate in this data set.

Diana Elliott, PRB: Yeah. I mean, women’s labor force participation right now is at a high. Um, so, you know, I think it’s something on the order of 77.8% or so. Don’t hold me to that. Um, but it’s it’s at an all-time high right now, and or at least in recent memory. And one of the reasons for that is we have a really tight labor market right now. And, um, we have this scenario where employers are willing to be a little bit more flexible.

We don’t always have this situation, though, and certainly one of the things that holds us back in our in this country from women, particularly 25 to 34, from having even higher labor force participation, is our lack of a care structure, that we don’t have adequate supports for childcare in the way that other similar peer countries do is a problem, and we are at this critical juncture right now where funding and supports for child care that were there during the pandemic are about to disappear. And this means that certain subsidies that were in place that allowed, um, child care operations to continue and persist, um, may not be there in the very near future because it’s really expensive and hard to run a child care center without that extra support.

So we could see a situation where this might be the high point in women’s labor force participation. Um, and, you know, as we tie this in with poverty, um, there are certain subsidies that make childcare more possible for, for women who are, you know, on the lower end of the income ladder. And again, without those supports and structures, um, they don’t necessarily, you know, they might qualify, for example, for subsidies, but they might not always have slots in various, um, childcare centers.

So we’re about to experience a potential cliff in terms of what women’s labor force participation looks like and whether that can persist. So, um, at least for women in this 25 to 34 year old age group, um, we’re seeing all time highs. But I fear that those highs will not last without adequate supports.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: That’s really important to keep in mind. You know, when we think about, um. This economic picture we’re in right now.

To Cara, I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about what helped drive down poverty during the pandemic, and what policies do you think could further bolster the winds. We were seeing for some women, in terms of the gender wage gap and employment to even more women, especially across these racial divides.

Cara Brumfield, The Center for Law and Social Policy: Yeah, absolutely. So, um. Something that made a huge impact on poverty during the pandemic, of course, is the American Rescue Plan. It played a huge role. It represented a huge investment in the well-being of our nation. And it really demonstrated that, uh, these kinds of investments are both possible and really impactful. And it made it even more clear and even more obvious how poverty really is a policy choice that we’re making.

We expanded access to Medicaid. Right now, we’re seeing the devastating of, uh, sort of impacts of unwinding those Medicaid provisions that were established during the pandemic, um, over 6 million, I don’t know the current number. I know it’s over 6 million people have already lost access to Medicaid. Um, we saw, uh, lower health care premiums, which is hugely important. We saw an eviction moratorium. Um, we saw relief payments that made a really big difference for a lot of people. We saw student loan debt relief, um, all of these things that are particularly impactful for people of color, people experiencing poverty, for women and for Millennials.

Uh, the American Rescue Plan Act also enhanced a child tax credit [CTC], which really, it helped slash poverty nearly in half. Um, a particular impact, obviously, on, um, families with young children, but also was really huge for people of color. Um, corporate lobbies helped kill the expanded CTC. Uh, at the same time, they were raking in record profits and often paying little to nothing in federal income taxes. Um. So I think that what we see is that we know what the policies are that help address poverty. It’s getting cash in hand to people who need it through things like tax credits, for example. It’s also bolstering our public benefits programs that help people access their basic needs, like food, health care and housing. Um, and we really need to be making those investments that have been proven to make a huge, significant difference.

Um, when it comes to sort of the, um, the wage, uh, gap, I think it’s important to remember that even as women are increasingly educated and increasingly entering the workforce, um, that when you think about it, um, sort of when you start to disaggregate it by race, you see that women of color are still disproportionately in those jobs that are the lowest paid, the jobs that have the most sort of hectic and unpredictable work schedules, uh, which makes it really challenging to have your health care or your child care needs met. Um, uh, so that has an impact on your ability to stay employed and to advance in your career. Um, and we know that given all of the student loan debt and how oppressive that has been, particularly for, for people of color, that those educational gains and those employment gains just aren’t paying off for folks the same way, um, that they might have expected them to.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Cara. Uh, Sara, I have a question for you as well. I was hoping you could talk to us a little bit about what we’re seeing and what you’ve seen from your data about Gen Z and their political power right now. You know, you said Gen Z is really coming of age, taking a seat at the political table. What will this mean in terms of not just representation, but change, not just for that generation or kind of youngest voters, but for the millennial women ahead of them to.

Sara Srygley, PRB: That’s a great question. We know that millions of new Gen Z members will be eligible to vote before the 2024 election, so in pure numbers, the potential voting bloc for Gen Z and Millennials combined is actually poised to outnumber baby boom voters. What we don’t know is if they’ll vote. So that’s the potential voting bloc. But that doesn’t guarantee that they’ll vote. We also don’t know how they’ll vote. They certainly have the numbers to see what’s important to them represented and in policy and in election outcomes at all levels.

But what we really need to be focusing on is empowering that generation, empowering Gen Z, and empowering Millennial members of our society to feel like they can make a difference and to understand how to do that, how to become engaged in their communities, how to become politically and civically engaged so that they can use those numbers that they have and represent their interests on those larger stages.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: Fantastic. And I’d like to do one more question to the panel as a whole before I ask for questions from our audience today, but I would love to just hear from you each right now. You know, one thing that really comes through in this data is the fact that there seems to be this bigger story about millennial women, and they are dying for a whole slew of different reasons. So I was wondering from where you all sit, how you’re thinking about what we can do to change this. What policy solutions are most needed right now to address how fatal it just is to be a young woman in America today? So if someone wants to jump in or I’ll pick on someone to start. Martha, you want to hop in?

Martha Sanchez, Young Invincibles: Yeah, I think, I mean, first we have to, um, work and fight for policies that protect women’s ability to make decisions over their own health care and their own bodies. Um, and I think, too, um, given what we’re seeing in terms of the increase in suicide rates, especially for women of color, we do need to reform, um, mental health.

Um, and the way that it is delivered in this country, mental health should not be treated as a specialty service 100% of the time. It should be a preventive care service. It should be as easy and as important as scheduling your annual physical to obtain mental health services from your provider. Um, and so that and that includes making at least the first three visits free. Um, under all private insurance plans. Um, and ensuring that we are changing the narrative of what it means to be healthy. Um, the same way that we look at social determinants of health, we have to look at the social determinants and economic determinants of mental health. So I think that’s where we have to focus on.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: Doctor Harris or Cara, either. Oh, you both jumped in. Okay, here, I’ll pick. Dr. Harris, okay.

Dr. Jamelia Harris, Justice and Joy National Collaborative: Yes, we just unmute at the same time! So, yes, I spoke a little bit about just concerns around the data that is showing that Black women particularly are experiencing higher rates of suicide and something that, uh, our recent research we have been engaging has been looking at the impact of police violence on girls and gender expansive young, uh, folks of color. We found that particularly, uh, police violence has, uh, detrimental impact on the mental health of Black girls and gender expansive young people. And we are now, uh, recently releasing a report that’s looking at the impact of vicarious trauma.

So thinking about experiences of engaging with police violence through social media, um, and especially thinking about this unprecedented moment, uh, of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which many young people were socially isolated from their peers and their loved ones. And in order to stay connected to them, uh, they were engaging on social media and an all-time high that we are seeing that many young people have vocalize at one, uh, they are severely experiencing mental health issues as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that two, police violence is a serious, uh, social health, uh, indicator of some of the challenges that they are experiencing with regard to mental health. And so I would say that, uh, one, I think that we really need to be talking about police violence as a global health, uh, related issue. And two, I think that we really need to be more intentional in thinking about the ways that we are engaging young folks in seeking solutions.

We recently, uh, had some conversations with young people and thinking about what their visions were for futures free from police violence, and they had incredible ideas and insights about ways that we can go about addressing police brutality. And to, to quote earlier, it was mentioned that, uh, young folks are now reaching the age in which they have political power and deserve a seat at the table. And I would say that we know that young folks have always, uh, really pushed for social, political justice in their communities, that they have always, even if they weren’t extended seats at the table.

To paraphrase the words of Shirley Chisholm, they brought their folding chairs, and they really can be the beacon of incredible change in their communities if we allow them, uh, to be a part of, of these spaces and allow them to be a part of seeking solutions to some of the challenges that we’re facing.

Cara Brumfield, The Center for Law and Social Policy: Yeah, I’ll, I’ll underline everything that was already shared. And I’ll just talk a little bit about poverty. Um, we need to address poverty. It is, um, extremely painful, stressful, traumatic. And I think we forget that it’s deadly. Poverty kills us. And as I mentioned earlier, it’s within our power and, uh, to, to address poverty with policy. And we need to do things that work that are demonstrated to have worked like the child tax credit.

We also need to invest, um, in our benefits system that helps meet basic needs. And we need to go beyond meeting just basic needs and try to build a system of benefits that is designed for people to thrive and experience abundance. Um, we also need to address, uh, corporate power, the corporate power that is undermining our shared prosperity in this country and especially oppressive for people of color and people experiencing poverty. And we need to do things that, uh, protect workers like, um, improve wages and provide other protections and supports like access to paid leave, for example, so that we can care for each other.

Diana Elliott, PRB: I’ll chime in and well, I’ll just say thank you to our panelists for those fantastic recommendations. Um, and at least from our perspective at PRB. I mean, we see a lot of power and data. I think these data really show how important it is to disaggregate data for different groups. Um, and that there is real power in being able to tell these stories, because on some of these measures, these deadly measures, we’re seeing different directions. Um, so you might see that white women, for example, have done better on some of these measures over time. While it’s not the case for women of color. So, um, power and data and showing as much disaggregated data as we possibly can.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: Thank you so much for that, Diana. I’m gonna, um. Very well. Some questions we’ve got from our audience right now. And I just want to remind everyone that anyone who’s here and in the audience, you are welcome to ask the question. And you can do so by just typing it into the Q&A box. And I will read it out loud, just like you’re about to see. And a panelist will answer. And when you’re asking a question, please be sure to also identify yourself and your organizational affiliation.

So I just want to start with, um, some of these that we have here. Um, we have a first question that says that, you know, we’ve got data showing that going to college, um, that, you know, women that go to college do make more annually than those that don’t. But what can we say from the report? What did you find in terms of that comparisons? And is it worth it for women to get into more debt at this point in time and more generally, what does this mean in terms of debt that Millennial women are carrying as a result of accessing this level of education compared to previous generations?

Sara Srygley, PRB: We did look in the report at other research. We did a lot of background research and looked into student loan debt and the racial and ethnic components as well as the gender component. And we did find that women hold more student loan debt than male peers, and that women of color hold more student loan debt than white women. So there, again, is a real disparity there that not only presents those barriers to higher education, but also increased stress for those who do obtain higher education.

So we’re seeing these higher rates of education, but with those higher rates of college degree attainment, we’re seeing that student loan debt coming alongside. And there are some real consequences to student loan debt beyond just the monetary consequences. There’s been research to support that. Mental and physical health is negatively impacted by student loan debt. And so whether or not the trade off is worth it, I think I’ll defer to some of Diana’s expertise on the benefits in terms of the finances of debt and degree attainment. But for sure, we see massive disparities, and we also see some real serious impacts to people’s health when they carry that student loan debt.

Diana Elliott, PRB: Yeah. And I’ll just chime in to say that one of the hardest statistics for me to see personally is that, um, non-completers who are more often first generation students, they’re more often students of color. Um, often go down the path of going to school trying to sort of gain that degree to improve their future prospects and have trouble completing for some of the reasons that Martha articulated earlier, that it, it can be a really sort of unwelcoming place.

And for various reasons, there are other family needs or other needs that arise along the way. They tend to be the people with sort of low amounts of debt that are the ones that go into delinquency the most. Um, and some previous research and work that I did looked at how, um, those who would benefit the most from student debt relief are actually black women. Um, Black women would stand to, to gain the most by student debt relief. So when we think about these policies being proposed by the administration in federal, um, sort of discussions, um, it’s really important to think about, um, how this could change a trajectory and create equity, for example.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: Thank you so much, everyone on that one. Um, you know, uh, Martha and maybe Doctor Harris, too. We have another question from Emma Bittner, who asks, can you speak more about the importance of cultural competency and the impact of the lack of providers of color when we’re talking about mental health care? Of course, anyone can jump in.

Martha Sanchez, Young Invincibles: Yeah. Um, I think in two different spaces. So we were just talking about how college campuses can not be a welcoming place for first generation students or students of color. Um, that’s because, you know, these institutions expect, um, that we come with the $5,000 to afford the meal plan or the dorm. Um, in the books and everything, on top of being an excellent student. Um, I know that one time I asked a professor for an extension and she said, well, in the real world, you don’t get extensions. But the reason why I need it is because I was working 30 hours a week as being a full-time student. So the stressors that students face on these campuses, um, where they don’t when they don’t have parents that are providing them with all of the financial and emotional support, are can be quite defining of their experience and of their ability to succeed. And it’s time that colleges take a realistic look at their needs in terms of the financial supports that need to be in place, that our government and state governments actually make investments in our ability to succeed in higher education.

Um, but in in these resources, something that will make a tremendous difference. Um, are the mental health resources, um, because for many first gen students, depending on, on their cultures, there’s a lot of stigma around mental health. And college campuses are actually the first safe place, oftentimes, where they can get free resources, free counseling, and the ability to connect with a counselor that understands their cultural experience or is at least open and willing to understand is really key and important, and then feeling supported. Um, so I think at the college level, increasing mental health resources is key. But then outside of that, um, we know that there’s a shortage of culturally competent providers. And that has to do with, again, the fact that that career path is not affordable.

We should be creating scholarships and financial assistance for students to go into the mental health fields, especially students of color, not just at the graduate level, because we know the data tells us, right, that students of color are not attaining master’s degrees at the same level as their white peers.

We need to look at the undergraduate level two and make sure that these students feel like that is a field open to them. Um, and that getting a psychology, psychology degree won’t just mean that they end up in debt and can never actually do anything with that. So we need to really take a look at our higher education systems. Are majors the financial requirements for them and be serious about what kind of workforce do we want to have in this country. Because even from an economic perspective, there is a need, there is a demand, and we’re not doing anything to meet that. And it’s, it’s unfortunate that we’re not providing these resources for the people who will be your doctors and teachers and politicians and scientists of tomorrow.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: If anyone else, uh, wants to help and let me know. But otherwise I’ll move on to our next question, which is from Roger. Mark D’Souza from Pack Two asks, women from marginalized communities faced intersecting forms of discrimination. How could we recognize and address intersectionality in data, policies and programs and better amplify diverse voices and foster inclusivity? Who wants to hop in before I pick on someone?

Dr. Jamelia Harris, Justice and Joy National Collaborative: I can hop in and just start us out. I think that the first point is the acknowledgment, uh, that an intersectional lens is necessary. Um, I think that, as I mentioned, the research that, that the Losing More Ground report is depicting is really a rarity. And, and I want to be clear, as someone who’s coming from the background of education, that oftentimes, uh, the data that we get is just not disaggregated. And that really, uh, prevents us from having a full picture of what is happening for so long.

Uh, there was this, this, uh, broad and dominant narrative that girls were doing fine in schools because we didn’t have the data that was showing that black, Latinx, Indigenous young folks, uh, were experiencing particular challenges. And so now that we have additional insights into some of the challenges that are facing Black girls within our public education system, such as their push out into the criminal justice system, we know that, uh, Black girls are one of the highest, uh, represented among girls who are suspended, expelled, arrested. And this has consequences on their, uh, social, political, economical outcomes later on in life. Now that we have that understanding, we’re able to implement the policies to, uh, address this inequity. We’re able to implement the programing initiatives that are specifically targeting their identities at the intersection of race and gender.

And so I think that it’s one a first step is, is really the acknowledgment, uh, that we need to be prioritizing an intersectional lens. And I believe that a second step of this is that, uh, we really need to be ensuring that the folks who we are, uh, trying to understand their experiences within these various social inequities are at the forefront of seeking solutions. Uh, Justice and Joy National Collaborative are a big part of our work, is really rooted in our belief that nothing about us should be without us.

And so we are constantly, uh, engaging young people who are systems impacted as we are taking on our research initiatives, as we’re taking on our policy advocacy, if we’re taking on our programing initiatives, and we really do this with the intention of prioritizing lived experience as expertise, which is something that I fundamentally believe, uh, needs to be happening across the board.

And so one of the questions that I always ask myself whenever I’m doing this work is, who’s in the room, who’s not in the room, whose voices need to be in this space, whose voices aren’t, uh, reflected in this space. And once we start to be more intentional and paying attention to who those folks are that are consistently not given a seat at the table. To go back to that, uh, analogy, then we can really move towards ensuring that we have the kinds of representation that we need to push the needle forward for all, uh, young women of color.

Sara Srygley, PRB: I’ll add to that. As Doctor Harris said, the availability of data to disaggregate in this way is a real challenge. So speaking from a data perspective, how we can improve this and continue to take that intersectional lens is we need responsible collection and analysis of data on marginalized groups. And there’s a lot of discussion right now. For example, one of the things that we dive into as much as possible in the report, but we’re really limited in, is looking at gender identity and sexual orientation and the impacts of those identities on health and safety and outcomes for young women today.

And there’s not a lot of data out there, and there’s not necessarily comparable data across generations. And so we were really limited. There’s discussion now around the inclusion of questions of gender identity and sexual orientation in some government data sets and things like that. Thinking about the responsible collection of data and the responsible handling of that data for marginalized groups is going to be a really important piece moving forward to how we are able to identify communities that are most at risk and address those risks.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: Fantastic. Thank you. And we have another question from Mark Mather who says this report is really about young women’s well-being. But he was wondering if anyone could speak to the potential impact of these patterns on children, since many of these women are also mothers.

Sara Srygley, PRB: So it’s absolutely true that many of these women are mothers, and we know that adverse childhood experiences have a long term impact for children. So these factors such as poverty, maternal stress, maternal mental health, uh, they will have those trickle down effects on the children of women today who are facing these problems and may increase adverse childhood experiences which affect the health and well-being of future generations. So when we talk about this data, it’s not just about today’s Millennial young women. It’s really about where we are today and where we’re going in the future. And so that’s why it’s so critical, because it’s not just about this moment in time. It’s about generations to come as well.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: You to go kind of a little bit more about what we were just talking about with data. I was hoping we could all stack, but we got a question from Jeff Jordan at PRB, who wanted to talk about disaggregated data and threats to the collection of this kind of data, what you’re seeing, what you’re feeling in this field, and then kind of conversely, what potentially new or promising sources in the future might provide even more evidence for policymakers and program planners. So, Sara, I know you just spoke a little bit about that, but we’d love to hear a little more from Diana, Sara, anyone else who wants to hop in?

Diana Elliott, PRB: Yeah, I can hop in. Um, you know, I think one of the biggest threats that we have is changes in administration and changes in policies on data or shall we say, preferences on what data are collected and what are not collected. Um, now, um, there are efforts afoot. OMB is, is in the process of collecting public commentary on, for example, the sexual orientation and gender identity question. There is the process of vetting new race and ethnicity questions, which could improve how some of these data are disaggregated. Um, but there is a real risk to, um, changes in terms of who can control or who can stop collection of data. We certainly saw that happen in 2016, certainly with race and ethnicity data and changes to federal surveys.

So there is a risk. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stop trying, though, because it’s incredibly important for understanding, as Sara was saying, which groups are affected most and which groups could most be helped by targeted and, um, specific policies in different areas. So, um, you know, I think the, the push for better data, data collection goes on. Um, and I don’t know if Cara has anything to add to this, since I know that she thinks about this a lot as well.

Cara Brumfield, The Center for Law and Social Policy: Yeah. Thanks, Diana. Um, I am a bona fide census nerd, which Diana knows well. Um, one of the challenges that I think about a lot is, um, how poorly we do at counting people of color in the decennial census, which is really the foundation of all of our data. Um, in the, in our nation, it sort of, it’s the universe from which we create samples for all other data analyzes. And we have never, in our history accurately counted, um, people of color, Black people. Um, we also have some challenges around disaggregation of census data. Um, I’ll just highlight that the Asian population, for example, a lot of disparities, um, are completely hidden when all of the Asian ethnicities and subgroups are sort of collapsed into this one big category. Uh, something else that I think a lot about is diversity and inclusion in, uh, among the data experts and, uh, the, the folks who make up the data infrastructure.

Um, we need, just as we need more diversity in the folks who provide us with our health care, we need more diversity in the people who collect and analyze and and discuss our data. Um, because they’re making a lot of decisions about which data to collect and how to collect those data and what those data mean, what the stories, those data are telling us. And we need people with lived experience of poverty, and we need people of color in those positions, because that’s going to help us have a more accurate understanding of what, um, what the data really means.

Sara Srygley, PRB: Absolutely. Uh, Cara, you’re so right that the decisions around what data to collect are really linked to the policy. And that goes back to that political and civic engagement. One thing that comes to mind for me, aside from that population data, is things like firearms research. We talk a bit in the report about some of the limitations that we face when looking at things like homicide rates and suicide rates, because there’s been limitations to funding at the federal level for agencies like the CDC to do quality research on the public health impacts of gun violence.

And so those changes in administration, those changes in policy have really limited our ability to compare gun violence and the impacts across generations in this report and continue to limit our understanding of those issues even today. So it extends really to sort of every area of data collection that is really critical to understanding what’s going on in our country and why we’re seeing these worse outcomes.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: Thank you so much, all of you. I know we are coming up against it. So I have one last question. Diana. I would just love for you to kind of close out our panel with a look ahead and what you see on the horizon for not only young millennial women right now, but for the generations of women coming after them. Despite all the losses in progress, this data set really points to what wins do you see ahead when it comes to women and equity?

Diana Elliott, PRB: Yeah. Thank you. Jennifer. Um, first of all, I just want to say that I am so heartened by, um, just the amazing panelists on this group. I mean, if this is the future of research and policy, we’re in really, really good hands here. Um, and I’ll say it was really a point of pride for us that we had multiple generations represented as authors on this report. We had a Gen Z author who created our Gen Z pop out box and did research to sort of figure out what issues were most important to her and her peers. Um, we have a Millennial lead author. Um, we have Gen X represented, um, trying to, you know, sort of, uh, represent our, our small and mighty, um, generation. So it was really important that we had this, this cross, um, perspective across generations. Um, and I think the future, um, is really bright, right? We, we know that we have really civically engaged younger generations, Millennial and Gen Z women are civically engaged.

Again, we have, we had this discussion earlier about whether they feel that they have a seat at the table or where they’re whether they’re, um, brought into even these discussions. I think that’s something that we all need to be mindful of moving forward, because, um, you need diversity of perspectives. You need diversity across generations to make the best policy. I’d say the other area where I’d like to see some positive traction is more evidence used for policymaking. So inclusion of lots of voices and evidence based policymaking. I think if we have those two put together, we have a really bright future in this country.

Jennifer Gerson, The 19th News, moderator: Thank you so much, Diana, and thank you to all of our really engaging, informed panelists today. Thank you all for attending and joining us today to and to learn more about losing more ground, please visit prb.org or click on the link in the chat. We’ll drop in right now to follow PRB on X @PRBdata or on LinkedIn. And thank you so much again, everyone for joining us today.