I don’t think “only thing he did was express romantic interest in people who weren’t as influential as him” would be a full characterization of the factual findings here. For example, the Boards found that the “frequency and the content of the advances contributed to the women’s feelings.” That’s still vague, but it’s more than merely expressing interest across a power/influence gradient. There’s a finding concerning inconsistent recognition (and thus, management) of conflicts of interest. There’s an implied finding that the circumstances of some expressions of interest were inappropriate: “it was difficult for the women to avoid interacting with Owen while the inappropriate actions were taking place, e.g. with a woman staying at Owen’s house.”
More generally: The Boards’ post lists their findings of fact at a fairly high level. The post clearly states that it is not a “shared perspective” document and that involved persons may disagree with some of the conclusions. There’s a footnote indicating that Owen doesn’t seem to agree with the factual finding you identified.
I think that’s enough here. It’s almost inevitable that factual findings in a matter like this will rely in significant part on information obtained in confidence and on reasoning that is not publicly disclosed. The Boards’ primary responsibility here was to take action necessary to protect the EVFs’ interests and those of involved members of the public. In my view, it would be inappropriate for the Boards to give less weight to information or reasoning merely because it could not be publicly disclosed. Given that, a disconnect between the presented rationale and the strength of the action is not terribly surprising.
Of course, the Boards are not trial courts for the EA community, and it would be reasonable to consider the relatively low reasoning transparency when deciding whether / how much to update, what to do in your own non-EVF organization, etc.
Furthermore, presenting evidence and reasoning favorable to Owen could make the post imbalanced if the information to which the Boards assigned greater weight could not be disclosed because of confidentiality commitments, concerns about losing legal privilege over the investigative report, etc. For example, some of the incidents involved people with formal power differentials; saying much more about those matters would likely pose a serious risk of identifying the individuals. I think giving Owen advance notice of the post’s contents and noting that he may wish to make a response was a reasonable approach here.
As well as the reasons Jason lists, I think there are difficulties relating to preserving anonymity here. The identities of the people involved are known to me, to Community Health, and to the external investigation—but not as far as I’m aware to the EV boards. The external investigation is complete, and I can’t share evidence with the EV boards without damaging that anonymity (although note also that I don’t completely agree with Kat’s characterisation of my view of the evidence). Moreover, although it’s transparent to me who this finding must be relating to, it’s presumably not transparent to the EV boards that it’s transparent to me, so I imagine they want to avoid leaking any bits of information about people who may or may not have spoken to the investigation. (I’m still not in fact certain that this person spoke to the investigation! It seems unlikely-but-conceivable that the finding is a garbled version of a thing I said to the investigation about the person’s bad experience.)
I understand now that the boards wanted to base their actions just on the findings of the investigation, so there could be no question about the process being impartial.
frequency and the content of the advances contributed to the women’s feelings.
If somebody doesn’t express disinterest in the romantic interest, why is frequency a problem? There is only one claimed case where a person says he didn’t stop when she said no, and he says he has written evidence against that.
For “content”, this could be reframed as saying “don’t ask people out in the wrong way” which seems like a vague and impossible standard. There is no right or wrong way to ask somebody out (of course, I’m sure there are edge cases).
If you combine someone frequently expressing sexual/romantic interest in you when there’s a power differential, that is a problem. It might mean, especially when the person who’s doing that is your boss/mentor/someone more senior than you, that you don’t feel like you can (clearly) refuse. When this is a situation involving a junior woman and a senior man, social behavior patterns of women being afraid of telling someone “no” often make this worse.
Even if both people are interested in each other, the way they relate to each other in an organization should ideally be changed to reduce the power differential. This is a standard procedure in some countries, e.g. Israel.
When this is a situation involving a junior woman and a senior man, social behavior patterns of women being afraid of telling someone “no” often make this worse.
I do think many women experience fear around this, and many have troubles expressing their wants in general. Many don’t though. What’s the solution then?
Should we encourage women to be strong, to do things that scare them, to stand up for themselves? Should we encourage women to tell people what they want instead of holding it in and not getting their needs met?
Or should we make it so they’re never in situations that they might feel scared? Should we protect women from any danger, including the danger of being asked out and it feeling awkward to say no?
It might mean, especially when the person who’s doing that is your boss/mentor/someone more senior than you, that you don’t feel like you can (clearly) refuse
It looks like this is saying that women can’t say no to powerful men? Why is that?
I assume that women are strong and independent and if a powerful person tells them to do something, they can say no just fine, just like anybody else.
I think it’s also highly salient that concerns about frequency were apparently raised by multiple women. This implies that they believed they had made it sufficiently clear enough that the attention was unwelcome before at least some of the expressions of interest. If there were just one report of that nature, one might conclude that the identified individual was not given enough information to reasonably understand that further attention was unwelcome. This becomes an increasingly unlikely theory as the number of reports increases.
My best guess is that it’s not correct that concerns about frequency were raised by multiple women, and the sentence is referring to different things contributing to the feelings of different people (most likely two).
In the case I’m aware of the key thing that went wrong was that I didn’t realise some of what I was communicating would be taken as continued expression of interest (I thought it was a settled “no”). Of course there may be a case where I’m still unaware of this facet of their experience.
If concerns about frequency were only raised by one person, the Boards should amend the second factual finding. If changing the text much would be problematic due to confidentiality concerns and/or ambiguities in the investigative report, changing “and” to “and/or” would at least help.
In my reading, the fifth finding involves a specific complaint about frequency.[1] Given that, there shouldn’t be references to frequency in the second paragraph in a context that implies that there were multiple such complaints (e.g., stating that frequency “contributed to the women’s feelings” (emphasis mine)). Rather, referring to the same complaint in both the second and fifth finding would constitute double-counting and thus overstate the findings.
In common language, I would describe a frequency concern as ~”it happened too many times.” I think that “it happened too many times” is necessarily implied by the fifth finding, that ~”it happened again to the same person after Owen was asked to stop.”
Thanks, I thought a bit more about this (I’d previously just been assuming that it meant the case I knew about), and I find it plausible it was more than one. In particular, as I explained in my notes there was a pattern in the cases of harm in which I read the other person as having more reciprocated attraction than they did. I find it plausible that things I said working from such a mistaken impression would have been read as advances, and have little idea what the frequency of such things could have been.
So there’s no confirmed person aside from the one listed, but there could feasibly be more?
Is there anybody aside from the one person publicly listed who asked you to stop expressing interest or asked you to stop talking to them or anything like that?
it was difficult for the women to avoid interacting with Owen while the inappropriate actions were taking place, e.g. with a woman staying at Owen’s house.
Is this cruxy for anybody? If people found out that he’d expressed romantic interest in somebody at his house, would people think that’s an bannishable offense?
Yes, in this specific context it’s a crux for me. If someone hosted a new person of the community at their house in a foreign country, and then made sexual advances at them, I’d not want that person to host newcomers/foreigners again. Edit: I’m writing in personal capacity here, this is not a statement by EA Germany.
OK. Does it make a difference that the only instance where we have public details, Owen wasn’t making sexual advances in his house? He just mentioned, to a friend where they were both doing radical honesty with each other, inspired by circling, that he was going to masturbate that day. When she wasn’t in the house. Not masturbating about her or anything. Just that he’d do what the vast majority of guys do every day.
She was a friend, not a colleague. He wasn’t doing professional connecting people with jobs or anything like that. He only started that role later.
It’s a weird thing to say in most contexts, but if you’re friends and have mutually agreed radical honesty, it seems fine. It would be like attending a circling event (where radical honesty is expected). As long as people are choosing to do it, then they’re adults and can do what they want.
Now, it’s unclear whether he also expressed romantic interest in others while at his house, and it’s also unclear whether such people were working for/with him or were visting his house as a friend, etc.
There’s a big difference between expressing interest on a social visit to one’s home and doing so under the circumstances described in the Time article to which this is apparently alluding. It’s not particularly for the person on a social visit to leave and thus get away from the situation.
concerning inconsistent recognition (and thus, management) of conflicts of interest
In the same article they say that Julia Wise also did this and had troubles managing conflicts of interest. Should she be banished for 2 years?
There are plenty of EA leaders who’ve had this problem (managing COIs is hard and not straightforward!) and they are not being banished.
It seems that the more likely explanation is that there was a big blow up for EA’s reputation with that Time magazine article, and EV is trying to protect themselves by making a public example of somebody.
The Boards found that Owen committed acts of sexual misconduct. That he failed to appropriately manage COIs related to expressing sexual/romantic interest is an aggravating factor to the finding that he had committed misconduct with respect to expressions of interest.[1] The Boards are not suggesting that a 2 year ban from EVF activities is some sort of default penalty for COI mismanagement.
I think many organizations in both the US and UK would have disassociated themselves from a former trustee for the conduct described in the Time magazine article alone. Thus, I do not think the sanction here is excessive. The Boards have no power to make decisions for the EA community or any other organization; that is up to all of us.
Julia made some (admittedly significant) errors of judgment in a very difficult situation not of her own making, where the existing policies, precedents, and resources were not remotely up to the task set before her. It is relatively uncommon for an organization to suspend or fire a longstanding employee for an honest mistake in judgment in one case on the job. I do not see any evidence that the Boards’ decision here was outside of their discretion.
I have no idea whether the Boards considered public reputation in deciding on this action. However, it would not have been inappropriate for the Boards to give some weight to Owen’s prominence and the need to set an example (“general deterrence”). By analogy, the US Department of Justice is pretty open that it goes after celebrities for criminal tax violations to achieve maximum public awareness and deterrence. Moreover, it’s appropriate to hold people in senior positions to a stricter standard.
It also wouldn’t have been inappropriate for the EVF UK Board to consider that it is under statutory inquiry in part for Board-related issues when addressing sexual misconduct by someone who was recently a trustee of that organization. No one has a right to be associated with EVF, and the Board’s responsibilities are to EVF and its mission, not to Owen personally. And of course, the Boards did not—nor did they have the power to! -- “banish[]” anyone from EA.
I don’t think “only thing he did was express romantic interest in people who weren’t as influential as him” would be a full characterization of the factual findings here. For example, the Boards found that the “frequency and the content of the advances contributed to the women’s feelings.” That’s still vague, but it’s more than merely expressing interest across a power/influence gradient. There’s a finding concerning inconsistent recognition (and thus, management) of conflicts of interest. There’s an implied finding that the circumstances of some expressions of interest were inappropriate: “it was difficult for the women to avoid interacting with Owen while the inappropriate actions were taking place, e.g. with a woman staying at Owen’s house.”
More generally: The Boards’ post lists their findings of fact at a fairly high level. The post clearly states that it is not a “shared perspective” document and that involved persons may disagree with some of the conclusions. There’s a footnote indicating that Owen doesn’t seem to agree with the factual finding you identified.
I think that’s enough here. It’s almost inevitable that factual findings in a matter like this will rely in significant part on information obtained in confidence and on reasoning that is not publicly disclosed. The Boards’ primary responsibility here was to take action necessary to protect the EVFs’ interests and those of involved members of the public. In my view, it would be inappropriate for the Boards to give less weight to information or reasoning merely because it could not be publicly disclosed. Given that, a disconnect between the presented rationale and the strength of the action is not terribly surprising.
Of course, the Boards are not trial courts for the EA community, and it would be reasonable to consider the relatively low reasoning transparency when deciding whether / how much to update, what to do in your own non-EVF organization, etc.
Furthermore, presenting evidence and reasoning favorable to Owen could make the post imbalanced if the information to which the Boards assigned greater weight could not be disclosed because of confidentiality commitments, concerns about losing legal privilege over the investigative report, etc. For example, some of the incidents involved people with formal power differentials; saying much more about those matters would likely pose a serious risk of identifying the individuals. I think giving Owen advance notice of the post’s contents and noting that he may wish to make a response was a reasonable approach here.
As well as the reasons Jason lists, I think there are difficulties relating to preserving anonymity here. The identities of the people involved are known to me, to Community Health, and to the external investigation—but not as far as I’m aware to the EV boards. The external investigation is complete, and I can’t share evidence with the EV boards without damaging that anonymity (although note also that I don’t completely agree with Kat’s characterisation of my view of the evidence). Moreover, although it’s transparent to me who this finding must be relating to, it’s presumably not transparent to the EV boards that it’s transparent to me, so I imagine they want to avoid leaking any bits of information about people who may or may not have spoken to the investigation. (I’m still not in fact certain that this person spoke to the investigation! It seems unlikely-but-conceivable that the finding is a garbled version of a thing I said to the investigation about the person’s bad experience.)
I understand now that the boards wanted to base their actions just on the findings of the investigation, so there could be no question about the process being impartial.
If somebody doesn’t express disinterest in the romantic interest, why is frequency a problem? There is only one claimed case where a person says he didn’t stop when she said no, and he says he has written evidence against that.
For “content”, this could be reframed as saying “don’t ask people out in the wrong way” which seems like a vague and impossible standard. There is no right or wrong way to ask somebody out (of course, I’m sure there are edge cases).
If you combine someone frequently expressing sexual/romantic interest in you when there’s a power differential, that is a problem. It might mean, especially when the person who’s doing that is your boss/mentor/someone more senior than you, that you don’t feel like you can (clearly) refuse. When this is a situation involving a junior woman and a senior man, social behavior patterns of women being afraid of telling someone “no” often make this worse.
Even if both people are interested in each other, the way they relate to each other in an organization should ideally be changed to reduce the power differential. This is a standard procedure in some countries, e.g. Israel.
I do think many women experience fear around this, and many have troubles expressing their wants in general. Many don’t though. What’s the solution then?
Should we encourage women to be strong, to do things that scare them, to stand up for themselves? Should we encourage women to tell people what they want instead of holding it in and not getting their needs met?
Or should we make it so they’re never in situations that they might feel scared? Should we protect women from any danger, including the danger of being asked out and it feeling awkward to say no?
I think the former is a better solution.
It looks like this is saying that women can’t say no to powerful men? Why is that?
I assume that women are strong and independent and if a powerful person tells them to do something, they can say no just fine, just like anybody else.
Am I missing something?
I think it’s also highly salient that concerns about frequency were apparently raised by multiple women. This implies that they believed they had made it sufficiently clear enough that the attention was unwelcome before at least some of the expressions of interest. If there were just one report of that nature, one might conclude that the identified individual was not given enough information to reasonably understand that further attention was unwelcome. This becomes an increasingly unlikely theory as the number of reports increases.
My best guess is that it’s not correct that concerns about frequency were raised by multiple women, and the sentence is referring to different things contributing to the feelings of different people (most likely two).
In the case I’m aware of the key thing that went wrong was that I didn’t realise some of what I was communicating would be taken as continued expression of interest (I thought it was a settled “no”). Of course there may be a case where I’m still unaware of this facet of their experience.
If concerns about frequency were only raised by one person, the Boards should amend the second factual finding. If changing the text much would be problematic due to confidentiality concerns and/or ambiguities in the investigative report, changing “and” to “and/or” would at least help.
In my reading, the fifth finding involves a specific complaint about frequency.[1] Given that, there shouldn’t be references to frequency in the second paragraph in a context that implies that there were multiple such complaints (e.g., stating that frequency “contributed to the women’s feelings” (emphasis mine)). Rather, referring to the same complaint in both the second and fifth finding would constitute double-counting and thus overstate the findings.
In common language, I would describe a frequency concern as ~”it happened too many times.” I think that “it happened too many times” is necessarily implied by the fifth finding, that ~”it happened again to the same person after Owen was asked to stop.”
Thanks, I thought a bit more about this (I’d previously just been assuming that it meant the case I knew about), and I find it plausible it was more than one. In particular, as I explained in my notes there was a pattern in the cases of harm in which I read the other person as having more reciprocated attraction than they did. I find it plausible that things I said working from such a mistaken impression would have been read as advances, and have little idea what the frequency of such things could have been.
So there’s no confirmed person aside from the one listed, but there could feasibly be more?
Is there anybody aside from the one person publicly listed who asked you to stop expressing interest or asked you to stop talking to them or anything like that?
Nobody else like that.
Is this cruxy for anybody? If people found out that he’d expressed romantic interest in somebody at his house, would people think that’s an bannishable offense?
Yes, in this specific context it’s a crux for me. If someone hosted a new person of the community at their house in a foreign country, and then made sexual advances at them, I’d not want that person to host newcomers/foreigners again.
Edit: I’m writing in personal capacity here, this is not a statement by EA Germany.
OK. Does it make a difference that the only instance where we have public details, Owen wasn’t making sexual advances in his house? He just mentioned, to a friend where they were both doing radical honesty with each other, inspired by circling, that he was going to masturbate that day. When she wasn’t in the house. Not masturbating about her or anything. Just that he’d do what the vast majority of guys do every day.
She was a friend, not a colleague. He wasn’t doing professional connecting people with jobs or anything like that. He only started that role later.
It’s a weird thing to say in most contexts, but if you’re friends and have mutually agreed radical honesty, it seems fine. It would be like attending a circling event (where radical honesty is expected). As long as people are choosing to do it, then they’re adults and can do what they want.
Now, it’s unclear whether he also expressed romantic interest in others while at his house, and it’s also unclear whether such people were working for/with him or were visting his house as a friend, etc.
Did you read the actual description of the incident in question?
What is the inaccuracy you’re pointing to?
There’s a big difference between expressing interest on a social visit to one’s home and doing so under the circumstances described in the Time article to which this is apparently alluding. It’s not particularly for the person on a social visit to leave and thus get away from the situation.
In the same article they say that Julia Wise also did this and had troubles managing conflicts of interest. Should she be banished for 2 years?
There are plenty of EA leaders who’ve had this problem (managing COIs is hard and not straightforward!) and they are not being banished.
It seems that the more likely explanation is that there was a big blow up for EA’s reputation with that Time magazine article, and EV is trying to protect themselves by making a public example of somebody.
The Boards found that Owen committed acts of sexual misconduct. That he failed to appropriately manage COIs related to expressing sexual/romantic interest is an aggravating factor to the finding that he had committed misconduct with respect to expressions of interest.[1] The Boards are not suggesting that a 2 year ban from EVF activities is some sort of default penalty for COI mismanagement.
I think many organizations in both the US and UK would have disassociated themselves from a former trustee for the conduct described in the Time magazine article alone. Thus, I do not think the sanction here is excessive. The Boards have no power to make decisions for the EA community or any other organization; that is up to all of us.
Julia made some (admittedly significant) errors of judgment in a very difficult situation not of her own making, where the existing policies, precedents, and resources were not remotely up to the task set before her. It is relatively uncommon for an organization to suspend or fire a longstanding employee for an honest mistake in judgment in one case on the job. I do not see any evidence that the Boards’ decision here was outside of their discretion.
I have no idea whether the Boards considered public reputation in deciding on this action. However, it would not have been inappropriate for the Boards to give some weight to Owen’s prominence and the need to set an example (“general deterrence”). By analogy, the US Department of Justice is pretty open that it goes after celebrities for criminal tax violations to achieve maximum public awareness and deterrence. Moreover, it’s appropriate to hold people in senior positions to a stricter standard.
It also wouldn’t have been inappropriate for the EVF UK Board to consider that it is under statutory inquiry in part for Board-related issues when addressing sexual misconduct by someone who was recently a trustee of that organization. No one has a right to be associated with EVF, and the Board’s responsibilities are to EVF and its mission, not to Owen personally. And of course, the Boards did not—nor did they have the power to! -- “banish[]” anyone from EA.
The findings do not state whether the COI problems were associated with the individuals who were known to be upset by the advances.