VoE - Joyce Chen === [00:00:00] Joyce Chen: All datas I've just described, right? With GDP, it's constructed by humans, based on their lived experiences, their biases, their lenses all of those things, right? And so data itself is never a neutral construct. Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. David Staley: I am pleased to be joined today by Joyce Chen, Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on demographic differences in labor [00:01:00] market outcomes, the complex relationships between migration, climate change, and economic development, and the inner household allocation of resources. Dr. Chen, welcome to Voices. Joyce Chen: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. David Staley: Well, I'm very interested in a transition story of yours. So, when you came to the university, you were in the Department of Agriculture, Environment, and Environmental and Developmental Economics, yes? Joyce Chen: That's correct. David Staley: But I introduced you as Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies. You changed departments? Joyce Chen: I did, I did. David Staley: So what, what's the story there? Why, why the change in departments? Joyce Chen: Well, I was very fortunate to have support from WGSS, the Department of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, as well as college leadership, both in my original College of Food and Ag and now in Arts and Sciences to be able to make this pivot. So, I wanna acknowledge that and all of the support. I really made the move because economics was no longer able to explain the things I wanted to explain. I had always been interested in economics and the ways that it looked at [00:02:00] how people respond to incentives and sort of how market structure and institutions can influence those incentives. But, increasingly we're in this environment where we see market failure after market failure, and economic theory just does not currently have the tools or perhaps the will to address those, I think, in a more humanistic way. Speaker: And so you didn't wanna stay within economics to bring about that sort of change. It's too exhausting, to... Joyce Chen: I, I'll share the story that sort of tipped the scales as I had written a paper about the gender pay gap here at Ohio State University. I went through peer review at one of the leading journals for agricultural economics, and one of the comments I got back from one of the reviewers was... the statistical analysis showed about a 9% gender gap between men and women, this is tenure track faculty at the university, and this was in [00:03:00] 2017, and one of the reviewers comments was, maybe women just don't like money as much as men. David Staley: Wow. Joyce Chen: And that was the moment where I thought... David Staley: That's peer review, is it? Joyce Chen: It is. It is. And it was so frustrating because, of course, it's something that can't be falsified. You know, there is no evidence to definitively prove that men don't like money more than women, and so it just became very clear to me that it was an uphill battle that I was never going to be on the right side of within that discipline. Speaker: Well, it's interesting you said economics can't explain what you need to have explained, so, and now you're in WGSS. Are the methods employed in WGSS more compatible or are you sort of developing your own theoretical framework to explain these things? Joyce Chen: I think it's a little bit of both, right? So, another example I'll give is with minimum wages, right? So, [00:04:00] economic theory has, and I think, you know, every neo classically trained economists would tell you that imposing a minimum wage is gonna lead to job loss and fewer jobs. That's exactly what the theory says. We could show it in diagrams. I've done it, you know, a hundred times in class. But then, we had several states and cities implement living wages. So, where I grew up in Seattle, they implemented a living wage of, I think it was $25 an, hour, and lo and behold, there was almost no job loss, and people were doing better, are doing better with that minimum wage in place, and so, this runs counter to all of economic, the most of economic theory I should say. And we still, in my opinion, don't have a great explanation for sort of why our theory didn't work there, right, and I think there's much more about power and about collective organizing and all those kinds of things that we need to think about as well as just the structure of, thinking about [00:05:00] how we distribute the surplus that's generated by workers, right? We think of Amazon as you know, sort of all of the surplus generated by all the delivery drivers and all the warehouse workers all go sort of to the CEO as the residuals. But there's a collective gain there from everybody working together, from having these huge shipping and warehousing networks, right, that it isn't just due to the CEO, right? It is all of, it's the collection of all those workers together that we don't quantify in the correct way in economic theory. David Staley: How were you trained as an economist? Were you trained in sort of a neoclassical classic approach? Joyce Chen: Yes, very much so. David Staley: So, what drew you to economics in the first place? Joyce Chen: So, partly it was kind of how central it is, I think, to a lot of the inequity that we see in the world and being able to relate that back to economic opportunity or lack thereof of, again, this gender pay gap, right? Of saying, oh, well, [00:06:00] you know, if women historically didn't have access to the same sources of education training, et cetera, no wonder they're not in super high impact jobs, right, like men are, no wonder they're not in this c-suite like men are. And so, relating that back to, okay, what are the institutions that we can adjust? What are the economic levers that we can manipulate to try to correct some of those inequalities? And I still think that's very important. There's just also a lot of social levers that we need to think about more deeply. David Staley: So I, I, I think of economics as a sort of a. Quantified discipline or as close to physics as any social science can be. Is that, is that part of the challenge? You think the sorts of things that you're interested in maybe aren't open to that sort of quantification? Joyce Chen: Yes. Well, they historically have not been quantified in that way, and that's something I've come to recognize, you know, as I've moved over to WGSS, right, is so much of the way we attribute value in our current economic system is about what can be [00:07:00] quantified, right? So, if we can't quantify a collective benefit or collective harm, right, even with air pollution, although we can sort of measure it, we don't make any attempt or we make very little attempt as a national government, right, to quantify the harms of that pollution and therefore to assign the cost of those harms to the polluters, right? And so, I think really questioning what do we see as quantifiable. What have we made efforts to quantify? How do we quantify things that historically have not been quantified or where there are differences in subjective valuation? David Staley: I'm thinking back to my undergraduate economics. They were called externalities, I think, and we learned about them in like one half hour lecture as I recall. Joyce Chen: Yes, precisely. But it goes even beyond that, right, things like actually all the work that we do in our home, for ourselves and for our families, right; those, in fact, are not externalities. They have very tangible outputs and products and... David Staley: [00:08:00] Gardening Joyce Chen: And... right. David Staley: Caring for children. Joyce Chen: Exactly. Cooking, laundry, all of those things, and there's a fundamental issue, in fact, in the way we count those things because when we purchase them as services from other people, and there is an official economic transaction, it gets counted in GDP; when there is no official transaction, it doesn't get counted right, and the, the mode of that production shouldn't be affecting whether or not it gets counted as some of the value produced within the economy. David Staley: Maybe this is a moment to talk about a course that you're teaching in WGSS called Data Feminism. Tell us about this course, it's a, it's a really intriguing title. Joyce Chen: Oh, thanks. Yes. This is my new favorite course to teach because it really allows me to kind of reflect back on a lot of the work that I did and a lot of the things that I learned in economics and to put a feminist lens on it. So, it is really just taking a feminist decolonial, you know, anti-racist lens to thinking about data and data analytics and acknowledging [00:09:00] that data are not neutral. I think we, particularly in economics, have this, you know, it's a, a bit of a conceit to say, well, the data tell us something as if the data are neutral and can tell a story free of context, which just isn't true, right? All datas I've just described, right? With GDP, it's constructed by humans, based on their lived experiences, their biases, their lenses all of those things, right? And so data itself is never a neutral construct. David Staley: Say, say a little more about that, about how, how data is constructed rather than just being something that, that an economist pulls outta the air. Joyce Chen: Right, so there are a lot of questions about A, you know, who we're collecting data from, right, so even if we think about our national statistics, when we do a census, people who don't live in a formal dwellings don't get counted in our census, right. There are also questions about with based on immigration status, how we want to count individuals in the census, right? So, [00:10:00] one is who do we think is even worthy of collecting data about what do we think is worthy of data collection, right? So again, as I mentioned, right, we don't collect data on how many meals did you cook at home last week in the census, right? We ask about your total take home pay or whatever it might be, right, and then also the way we code things, right? So recent change in census to actually finally have additional racial categories, right, like Middle Eastern to break out Asian Americans by specific ethnicities. That's all reflecting changes in our sort of priorities. Who has a say in the design of these data products? David Staley: Given all these imperfections in data, how do we use such data, or, or is that the point, we shouldn't use such data? Joyce Chen: Oh no, I think we should use the data. I think we should, it is good practice to use data. I think what I would argue is that, increasingly in this environment, and especially if we think about corporations [00:11:00] and all of the passive data that's being collected through our phones, our data is, is power in today's world. And so, I think for humanists to, it's really important for humanists to engage in discussions about data so that we infuse the right ethical principles and the right lenses when thinking about bias and, you know, colonial practices and all of those things when we do use data, David Staley: Hmm. So, the students in this data feminism class, so what are they, what are they doing? Are they generating data? Are they, are they studying data? What are, if I'm a student in the class, what should I expect? Joyce Chen: Yeah, so it's a 2000 level class, so we don't get too much into data analytics, but they do have two exercises working with data three actually. So, two that are kind of more standard assignments and they're asked to produce some graphs and some data visualizations, and then describe why they chose, create the [00:12:00] visualization in the way that they chose, right, and how that might affect the interpretation or the reception of that data. So, it's that critical piece of thinking about how, your own influences, right, might influence the way you present something. David Staley: Give us an example of that, how choosing the way to depict or to visualize data can make a difference. Joyce Chen: Yeah, so actually from this exam or from this assignment there's one piece where they're asked to show the gender pay gap between men and women and this hypothetical data set and the, it's an hourly pay rate. So the gap is something like between, you know, 17.75 an hour and like 18, 15 an hour or something like that. So, if you graph that with on the, your vertical axis going from zero to 20, that gap looks quite small, right? If you graph it with your vertical axis going from 16 to 19, that gap looks quite large. So, even something as small as just kind of changing the [00:13:00] scale on which you're presenting the data really influences the visual impact of how you relate to that information. David Staley: Hmm. It's like teaching students how to read, read a graph. Joyce Chen: Yes. Yes, exactly. David Staley: What else can we expect in this course? Joyce Chen: Oh, so the other really fun thing that we're doing is a service learning project with the Matriots of Ohio. So that is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that helps to increase women's representation in the political process. And so, what we're doing this semester is working with some of their donor data. It's anonymized and the students will be able to look through that data and generate their own visualizations to provide some insight to the organization about how they might better engage with donors moving forward. David Staley: I'm interested in some of your research projects and I wonder if we might start with climate induced migration in Bangladesh. Joyce Chen: Mm-hmm. David Staley: Can you tell us about this research project? Joyce Chen: Yeah, so this is Bangladesh, of course is [00:14:00] you know, sort of at this perfect storm of potential climate disasters as most folks know, right? With sea level rise, the land itself is, is sinking, storm cycles are getting worse, precipitation cycles are becoming harder to predict and then of course, upstream dams and things from countries upstream are also affecting water flow downstream. So, with all of this precarity in Bangladesh, we want to see how much people are adapting by using migration as a coping mechanism. And I think migration is a really interesting one to look at because in a lot of ways sort of, the last resort, right, of people, people in general don't want to move away from where they've built their lives, right? And so, in one sense it's the kind of you know, it is this last resort that we're looking at, but it's also can be a bellwether. And we're starting to see this on the us on the coast as well, right? Folks who are moving away from coasts as they're [00:15:00] anticipating growing risks. And from a data perspective, it's also a challenge because it's really hard to track. We typically either collect data, we collect data from folks in a place. It's very hard to collect data about folks who've left the place, and so this was a unique sort of academic and scholarly challenge, just thinking about how we get information on migrants. David Staley: How do you solve that? Joyce Chen: So some of that is we, I was fortunate to be part of a longitudinal survey, so we're able to track households over time and where those folks have gone or left based on their connections with existing or preexisting household members. We also started implementing some phone surveys. Where we would call people based on contact information we got from their household members and ask about their migration experiences and how that was going. And some of it was just following up with other household members and saying, where is this person now? And being more intentional about incorporating that data and thinking about the migrant still [00:16:00] as a. Perhaps tangential member of that household, but not as, in a lot of prior surveys, migration or other surveys, migrants are often treated as having left the household and no longer being a member. David Staley: In Bangladesh., You, you talk about people migrating as a, as a solution to a problem. Joyce Chen: Mm-hmm. David Staley: To where are they migrating? Joyce Chen: Oftentimes they're going to larger cities, so Dhaka primarily... David Staley: Within Bangladesh. Joyce Chen: Within Bangladesh, yes. And that was actually, Bangladesh was a great context for this research because geographically it is a very small country, so we were able to track a lot of migrants in person as well. But yes, so predominantly they're going to the larger cities, so Dakha and Chittagong. There's also a considerable amount of migration to India. Some to increasingly to the Middle East. That of course tensions with India are making that migration more challenging as well. David Staley: Is part of the research to look at not just the fact that they have moved and to where they're moving, but what their lives are in this new location? Joyce Chen: [00:17:00] Yeah, so was to understand are they how are they faring in their new locations? And there's a lot of research and we are moving in that direction of thinking about migration networks. We know that folks tend to follow their friends, right, or follow folks in their network for migration, and that can help improve outcomes among migrant. Another thing we discovered, again because Bangladesh is quite small geographically, is that there's a lot of circular migration or temporary migration where people go to daca from the countryside and they work in the city and come home to the village maybe once or twice a month. Right. So they have not quite a full household in the city, right? Many of them are domestics or working in in factory settings where they have housing provided by employers. And so they would come home to the villages a couple of times a month or, or several times a year. And so this is kind of a liminal. Space of, you know, are you, this is different than say for us, you know, college students who move out of their [00:18:00] parents' house after they graduate kind of thing. Ideally, and, but much more like a consistent, almost a commuter type situation. And so trying to understand the parameters of how that works and how people continue to engage with their other household members when they're doing that kind of circular migration. David Staley: Hmm. You mentioned climate migration in the United States. Mm-hmm. And I don't know if this has been part of your research, but to where, to where are US climate migrants moving? Just away from the coasts or Joyce Chen: that seems to be, yes. It's a, it's a very interesting scenario in the us where I, I mean, this is true I guess throughout the world, right? It tends to be very bifurcated. Folks who are living in environmentally precarious areas are either very high income, right? Have lovely homes on stilts on the beach, or, very underprivileged, right? Are, are renters in very precarious housing environments. And so [00:19:00] we see different modes of migration, right? Oftentimes there's a, what's called like a trapped population dynamic, right? With folks who are lower income, don't have the resources to move away from that kind of risk. Versus the exodus of, of wealthier households who no longer wanna be engaged with that kind of risk. David Staley: You, you just raised this, and I know that part of your research shows that climate pressures in Bangladesh influence migration, but the magnitude can be modest because especially the poorest households oftentimes can't move. How does that reshape the narrative of inevitable mass climate migration? Joyce Chen: Yeah, that's a great question. And so I think we're really struggling with this tension between what folks call managed retreat, where we try to manage a, a retreat of populations proactively out of environmentally risky areas versus. Thinking about how we deal with [00:20:00] a catastrophic event. And this we find also relates to migration, right? That a lot of migration occurs in response to kind of one-off events, right? One, a couple of bad floods or a couple of bad crop cycles. We really don't have his, a lot of historic evidence or. We're not able to extrapolate from historic events as to what might happen in, in a catastrophic circumstance. David Staley: You mentioned the phone-based surveys mm-hmm. That you've used. Mm-hmm. I'm interested in other methods in this research and in particular, I know you use remote sensing environmental data. I'd like to hear more about these data and some of the other methods that you employ. Joyce Chen: Yeah, so that was with collaborators in the, in the School of Earth Sciences we used remote sensing data that allows us. To identify when water is covering the land area and also to identify the density of vegetation. David Staley: Hmm. Joyce Chen: So we can attempt to infer flooding [00:21:00] events with that data and also how well crops are doing. Within within an area. And that was also very interesting, brought me to this question of data objectivity, right? Of, and in some sense that kind of satellite imagery seems very objective, right? It is a picture and the pixel is green or the pixel is red, and but the way in which we interpret it actually is, is much there's a lot more to unpack in the way we interpret that. Right? Like, like what? Like thinking about, so this was something I had to work with my earth sciences colleagues to on, right? Was okay if this pick, if this pixel is water today, how do I know that this is flood water versus a lake that's already been here? Right. And so how would I adjust for existing bodies of water versus what is new water, right. Of like you know, is this a flooding event where there's been inundation that wasn't [00:22:00] there before? Right. And also questions about how frequently does the satellite imagery update? Right. So if we have a very quick flash flooding event, oftentimes satellite imagery isn't gonna pick that up because it doesn't come through frequently enough, right? You really need it on an hourly or a daily basis, right? Rather than on an eight day cycle, as many of the images are. David Staley: How did your earth sciences colleagues respond to your queries? Joyce Chen: They were very accommodating. But it was interesting to see that these were, we had very different perspectives coming to it. I think in the earth science, the way I understood the earth science context, it was much there. They were much more concerned about accuracy. Right. So sort of, okay, we constructed this measure based on the color of the pixels and other, you know, processing effects. And then we ground truth it. And so, you know, we against the three periods of time, or you know, three dates where we ground truth, this, this measure performed really well. And ground truth means, [00:23:00] Speaker: look, we're actually seeing Joyce Chen: what's on the ground, not just from the. Exactly, exactly. So using physical measurements or observation versus from a social science perspective, we were much more interested in to what extent does this capture the experience of people on the ground, right? It's great that the measure is accurate, but if that's not what's relevant to people on the ground, we have to kind of finesse that. David Staley: So they didn't roll their eyes at you? Joyce Chen: No, no. Well well, not in front of me. David Staley: Well I'm interested in another migration project mm-hmm. That you've worked on understanding short term migration. So tell us, tell us about this research project. Joyce Chen: Yeah, so this is, as I mentioned related to that idea of circular migration. Yeah. And when are people making this choice to engage in short term migration versus a. A permanent move. I think it's quite common, right? In fact, even our, in our own context, we could think of, or any US context, we could think of college as being [00:24:00] a short term migration for a lot of folks, right? Mm-hmm. Or maybe you take a job for a couple of years in San Francisco and then you find a more reasonably priced place to live, right? And so just kind of trying to understand those dynamics of. Who goes along on those migration episodes? What kind of relocation is happening? How do resources flow between the migrant and the household that they're coming from and the area that they're originating from? We have a lot of these discussions, you know, even in the current context, thinking about immigrants and immigration. Right. Or where our remittance is going, how much money is being remitted as opposed to staying in the US economy. So all of that I think is, is even more relevant in the context of circular migration or temporary migration than in the context of permanent migration where you have a little bit more separation between the household and the migrant. David Staley: And this study is larger than just Bangladesh, is that correct? Joyce Chen: It's been focused primarily [00:25:00] on Bangladesh. Oh, okay. David Staley: Mm-hmm. I, I don't know how, I don't know how I wanna ask this, so I'll just ask it. Oh, yeah. Do, do people choose to migrate or is it a choice that's sort of foisted on them? Joyce Chen: I, I would say it's a spectrum. So we do have people who, who choose to migrate where you know, they have the most agency. Right. And, so, you know, I chose to come here to Ohio State Right. From where I was. And and at the other extreme we have folks who are in either entirely trapped and can't move when they wanna move or are forced out and have to move when they don't want to. David Staley: Hmm. I'm curious to, to know, I'm curious to know what drew you to economics in the first place? Did you know when you were, I dunno, four years old, you were gonna be an economist as opposed to, I don't know, a violinist or a, or a basketball player? I don't know why, why, why economics? Joyce Chen: Really because of how much I saw it was tied to, it's [00:26:00] inequality is really, and and disparities across groups and across individuals, right? And explaining how changing those economic opportunities or shifting what's available to folks can shift outcomes. You know, increasingly I think that has to be enriched by also thinking about. How shifting those opportunities without shifting our underlying institutions and societal factors is insufficient. David Staley: Yeah. So you're going into economics. When you went to university, you knew it was economics? Joyce Chen: Well, no, actually I started out wanting to be a Women's Studies major. David Staley: Oh, okay. Joyce Chen: My parents were not so thrilled about that, and so I'm delighted that I've been able to come full circle. And back to women's studies now. David Staley: Tell us what's next for your research? What are you working on now? What's next? Joyce Chen: So now I've been kind of, you know, retooling since I joined women's studies and I should say in between my time in ag econ and women's studies. I did take a couple of years off to work in Amazon in their corporate [00:27:00] HR space. So doing research, looking at again. Differences across demographic groups and HR outcomes and how we might be able to mitigate those. So I'd love to take some of those learnings and bring them back here and to my research and also to work more with nonprofits. I sit on a few different boards now and the Columbus community and to bring those learnings to boards and think about how I can help them with research. I think among economists, there's a. What publishes well is oftentimes not the research that's needed for folks to make better decisions within their organizations and even within their lives. And so I'd like to be able to spend more time focusing on research that's gonna be impactful for people. David Staley: Has your research ever led to policy intervention of some kind? Joyce Chen: I, I can't say directly. I do know that the university did I believe two years ago make some efforts at looking at pay equity among tenured faculty. [00:28:00] And so there were some equity adjustments provided in that case, which I would like to think was related to my research, but, I was never told that. David Staley: Hmm. And we have come full circle. Joyce Chen, thank you. Joyce Chen: Thank you. Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.