This comment is not intended to detract from the work that WANBAM has done (it’s partly premised on the assumption that their mentoring work has likely been valuable to the individual people receiving mentorship): what would your views be about funding an EA mentoring program that was open to male EAs?
The case for such an initiative being extremely valuable seems very strong on the face of it. This is based on the assumption that mentoring is very valuable to individuals (this may have collective benefits if it makes them more impactful) and that there are many people who would benefit from mentoring and can’t access it who are men. Both of those assumptions seem uncontroversially true. I would not be surprised if extending mentoring to more EAs paid for itself several times over and the Meta Fund does not seem particularly funding constrained. Adjudicating how this compares to other initiatives would depend on more controversial questions, especially if mentoring time is a scarce resource which can only be allocated to a somewhat fixed number of individuals, but it seems worth reflecting about.
One reason why this seems worth discussing explicitly is that I think that many people would be afraid to pitch a mentoring scheme that was open to men given that WANBAM exists (as I am somewhat afraid to make this comment) in case anyone infers any nefarious motivation behind it.
I think that many people would be afraid to pitch a mentoring scheme that was open to men given that WANBAM exists
FWIW, I find this very surprising, and like Denise personally have the opposite intuition.
(What I would be hesitant to do—but not because I’m afraid but because I think it’s a bad idea—is to pitch a mentoring scheme that explicitly emphasizes or discusses at length that it’s open to men, or any other audience which is normally included and would be odd to single out.)
In general, the default for most things is that they’re open to men, and I struggle to think of examples where the mere existence of an opportunity with this property has been controversial. (This is different from suggesting that specific existing opportunities should be open to men, or bringing up this topic in contexts where people are trying to discuss issues specific to other audiences. These can be controversial, but I think often for good and very mundane reasons.)
It’s also worth noting that a lot of mentoring happens outside of explicitly designed mentorship schemes. For example, as part of my job, I’m currently mentoring or advising six people, five of which happen to be male. And personally I’ve e.g. benefitted from countless informal conversations about my career.
In fact, hopefully any kind of work together with more experienced people includes aspects of mentorship. Mentoring seems such a ubiquitous aspect of work relationships that it makes a lot of sense to me that specific mentorship schemes will tend to focus on gaps in the existing landscapes, e.g. aspects of mentorship not usually provided in the workplace or mentorship on issues specific to certain audiences.
Specific mentorship schemes thus only represent a tiny fraction of the total mentoring that’s happening. As a consequence, I think the fact that some or all of them are only open to specific audiences or focus on specific kinds of mentorship is poor evidence for imbalances in the mentorship landscape at large. (Except perhaps indirectly, i.e. the fact that someone thought it’s a good idea to start a scheme focused on X suggests there was a gap in X.)
What I would be hesitant to do—but not because I’m afraid but because I think it’s a bad idea—is to pitch a mentoring scheme that explicitly emphasizes or discusses at length that it’s open to men, or any other audience which is normally included and would be odd to single out.)
In general, the default for most things is that they’re open to men.
It is true that most things are open to men, in the sense that (at least in the west) most careers, associations and organisations are open to both men and women. But it seems definitely the case that it is much more common to exclude men from something than to exclude women. So if your principle opposing emphasizing the acceptance of widely-accepted groups was commonly held, it would actually oppose the existance of an EA mentoring group specifically for women.
Consider some examples from high status organizations:
* At Harvard there are 21 non-sport clubs dedicated for women—they get a special section on the website. In contrast, the only such club I can think of for men was the Black Man Forum.
* The Democratic Party Platform has multiple sections dedicated to women, but none to men. The Republican Party Platform is not really organized into sections, but a similar principle applies at the content level, to a lesser degree.
* The Department of Labor has a women’s bureau, but no men’s bureau.
* Girls are allowed to join Scouts now, but boys are not allowed to join Guides.
This is I think basically because advocating for men in general is viewed as very low status, whereas advocating for women in general is high status. Consider the differing levels of respect that Mens Rights Advocates are held in vs Feminists. Indeed, Robin Hanson, who has been very influential on many EA topics, was recently deplatformed from an EA group, after consultation with CEA, because of a smear campaign resulting from his advocacy with regard male-effecting suffering. Even if this was the right decision, I think it is clear that he would not have been treated so had he instead been raising awareness of female suffering.
In light of this I think the grandparent’s caution makes perfect sense: given there is already a women’s group, pitching a group that was open to men would only benefit men, and this sort of advocacy is at best viewed as cringe-worthy and low status, to at worst a cancelable offense.
It is also quite possible that a more inclusive mentoring group might undermine the women’s mentoring one. Consider the case of the female-only universities. In the old days Bryn Mawr had extremely high quality students, because the top women had few alternatives; but since they gained the option to go to Harvard, Bryn Mawr has declined dramatically. A similar thing might happen here: if there was a universal mentoring group that gave women access to both male and female mentors, why would they choose the segregated group that restricted them to a subset of mentors?
Thanks for the pushback. I think my above comment was in parts quite terse, and in particular the “odd” in “would be odd to single out” does a lot of work.
So yes, it agrees with my impression that in a reference class of explicit formalized groups similar to those you mentioned it’s more common for men to be excluded than for women to be excluded. The landscape is too diverse to make confident claims about all of it, but I think in most cases I’d basically think it isn’t odd to explicitly single out women as target audience while it would be odd to explicitly single out men.
I suspect it would require a longer conversation to hash out what determines my assessments of ‘oddness’ and how appropriate they are relative to various goals one might have. Very briefly, some inputs are whether there was a history of different treatment of some audience, whether that audience still faces specific obstacles, has specific experiences or specific needs, and whether there are imbalances in existing informal groups (e.g. similar to the above point on mentoring being ubiquitous surely a lot of informal networking happens at McKinsey).
I think this kind of reasoning is fairly standard and also explains many instances of target audience restriction and specialization other than the ones we’ve been discussing here. For example, consider the Veterans Administration in the US or Alcoholics Anonymous.
I think I don’t want to go into much more depth here, partly because it would be a lot of work, partly because I think it would be a quite wide-ranging discussion that would be off-topic here (and possibly the EA Forum in general). I appreciate this may be frustrating, and if you think it would be important or very helpful to you to understand my views in more detail I’d be happy to have a conversation elsewhere (e.g. send me a PM and we can find a time to call).
FWIW, while I suspect we have a lot of underlying disagreements in this area, I’ve appreciated your pushback against orthodox liberal views in other discussions on this forum, and I’m sorry that your comment here was downvoted.
A similar thing might happen here: if there was a universal mentoring group that gave women access to both male and female mentors, why would they choose the segregated group that restricted them to a subset of mentors?
I had actually also asked WANBAM at some point whether they considered adding male mentors as well but for different reasons.
I think at least some women would still prefer female mentors. Anecdotally, I often made the experience that it’s easier for other women to relate to some of my work-related struggles and that it’s generally easier for me to discuss those struggles with women. This is definitely not true in every case but the hit rate (of connections where talking about work-struggles works really well) among women is much higher than among men and I expect this to be true for many other women as well.
I think at least some women would still prefer female mentors.
That makes perfect sense to me. But a co-ed mentoring group would presumably be able to offer female mentors to those who wanted them, leaving it equally good for those who preferred women and superior for those who were open-minded or preferred men. I guess some women might be too shy to specify “and I would like a women” in a mixed group, so having WANBAM allows them to satisfy their preference more discretely.
In short: yes, we are open to funding other mentorship programmes, including ones open to men.
I would be pretty sad if people felt less motivated to start a mentorship programme because we already funded another. I am hoping for the opposite effect. I agree that mentorship is very valuable.
My intuition is that people consider us willing to fund a project with one target audience as positive evidence for us willing to fund a similar project with a different target audience, as it provides proof of concept that we are willing to fund such projects in principle.
For example, we have funded fundraising & tax-deductibility initiatives in different countries so far and we keep seeing applications for them.
If someone wants to start a mentorship programme with a different target audience to WANBAM, I am keen for them to apply to the Meta Fund.
I am not the meta fund, but I’d be excited to see a variety of quality mentoring schemes in EA with different goals (just like I’d be excited to see a variety of career coaching organisations and charity evaluators)
Hi, I am the CEO of WANBAM. I would be delighted to welcome and support emerging EA mentorship programs with lessons learnt and advice. You can reach me at eamentorshipprogram@gmail.com. One of the things I love about WANBAM is we are experimenting with what works (and doesn’t)! I hope as we dial it in we will add value to emerging projects with lots of different communities and purposes. Be in touch! :)
This comment is not intended to detract from the work that WANBAM has done (it’s partly premised on the assumption that their mentoring work has likely been valuable to the individual people receiving mentorship): what would your views be about funding an EA mentoring program that was open to male EAs?
The case for such an initiative being extremely valuable seems very strong on the face of it. This is based on the assumption that mentoring is very valuable to individuals (this may have collective benefits if it makes them more impactful) and that there are many people who would benefit from mentoring and can’t access it who are men. Both of those assumptions seem uncontroversially true. I would not be surprised if extending mentoring to more EAs paid for itself several times over and the Meta Fund does not seem particularly funding constrained. Adjudicating how this compares to other initiatives would depend on more controversial questions, especially if mentoring time is a scarce resource which can only be allocated to a somewhat fixed number of individuals, but it seems worth reflecting about.
One reason why this seems worth discussing explicitly is that I think that many people would be afraid to pitch a mentoring scheme that was open to men given that WANBAM exists (as I am somewhat afraid to make this comment) in case anyone infers any nefarious motivation behind it.
FWIW, I find this very surprising, and like Denise personally have the opposite intuition.
(What I would be hesitant to do—but not because I’m afraid but because I think it’s a bad idea—is to pitch a mentoring scheme that explicitly emphasizes or discusses at length that it’s open to men, or any other audience which is normally included and would be odd to single out.)
In general, the default for most things is that they’re open to men, and I struggle to think of examples where the mere existence of an opportunity with this property has been controversial. (This is different from suggesting that specific existing opportunities should be open to men, or bringing up this topic in contexts where people are trying to discuss issues specific to other audiences. These can be controversial, but I think often for good and very mundane reasons.)
It’s also worth noting that a lot of mentoring happens outside of explicitly designed mentorship schemes. For example, as part of my job, I’m currently mentoring or advising six people, five of which happen to be male. And personally I’ve e.g. benefitted from countless informal conversations about my career.
In fact, hopefully any kind of work together with more experienced people includes aspects of mentorship. Mentoring seems such a ubiquitous aspect of work relationships that it makes a lot of sense to me that specific mentorship schemes will tend to focus on gaps in the existing landscapes, e.g. aspects of mentorship not usually provided in the workplace or mentorship on issues specific to certain audiences.
Specific mentorship schemes thus only represent a tiny fraction of the total mentoring that’s happening. As a consequence, I think the fact that some or all of them are only open to specific audiences or focus on specific kinds of mentorship is poor evidence for imbalances in the mentorship landscape at large. (Except perhaps indirectly, i.e. the fact that someone thought it’s a good idea to start a scheme focused on X suggests there was a gap in X.)
It is true that most things are open to men, in the sense that (at least in the west) most careers, associations and organisations are open to both men and women. But it seems definitely the case that it is much more common to exclude men from something than to exclude women. So if your principle opposing emphasizing the acceptance of widely-accepted groups was commonly held, it would actually oppose the existance of an EA mentoring group specifically for women.
Consider some examples from high status organizations:
* At Harvard there are 21 non-sport clubs dedicated for women—they get a special section on the website. In contrast, the only such club I can think of for men was the Black Man Forum.
* Goldman has a woman’s network, but no men’s network.
* Mckinsey has a women’s network, but no men’s network
* The Democratic Party Platform has multiple sections dedicated to women, but none to men. The Republican Party Platform is not really organized into sections, but a similar principle applies at the content level, to a lesser degree.
* The Department of Labor has a women’s bureau, but no men’s bureau.
* Girls are allowed to join Scouts now, but boys are not allowed to join Guides.
This is I think basically because advocating for men in general is viewed as very low status, whereas advocating for women in general is high status. Consider the differing levels of respect that Mens Rights Advocates are held in vs Feminists. Indeed, Robin Hanson, who has been very influential on many EA topics, was recently deplatformed from an EA group, after consultation with CEA, because of a smear campaign resulting from his advocacy with regard male-effecting suffering. Even if this was the right decision, I think it is clear that he would not have been treated so had he instead been raising awareness of female suffering.
In light of this I think the grandparent’s caution makes perfect sense: given there is already a women’s group, pitching a group that was open to men would only benefit men, and this sort of advocacy is at best viewed as cringe-worthy and low status, to at worst a cancelable offense.
It is also quite possible that a more inclusive mentoring group might undermine the women’s mentoring one. Consider the case of the female-only universities. In the old days Bryn Mawr had extremely high quality students, because the top women had few alternatives; but since they gained the option to go to Harvard, Bryn Mawr has declined dramatically. A similar thing might happen here: if there was a universal mentoring group that gave women access to both male and female mentors, why would they choose the segregated group that restricted them to a subset of mentors?
Thanks for the pushback. I think my above comment was in parts quite terse, and in particular the “odd” in “would be odd to single out” does a lot of work.
So yes, it agrees with my impression that in a reference class of explicit formalized groups similar to those you mentioned it’s more common for men to be excluded than for women to be excluded. The landscape is too diverse to make confident claims about all of it, but I think in most cases I’d basically think it isn’t odd to explicitly single out women as target audience while it would be odd to explicitly single out men.
I suspect it would require a longer conversation to hash out what determines my assessments of ‘oddness’ and how appropriate they are relative to various goals one might have. Very briefly, some inputs are whether there was a history of different treatment of some audience, whether that audience still faces specific obstacles, has specific experiences or specific needs, and whether there are imbalances in existing informal groups (e.g. similar to the above point on mentoring being ubiquitous surely a lot of informal networking happens at McKinsey).
I think this kind of reasoning is fairly standard and also explains many instances of target audience restriction and specialization other than the ones we’ve been discussing here. For example, consider the Veterans Administration in the US or Alcoholics Anonymous.
I think I don’t want to go into much more depth here, partly because it would be a lot of work, partly because I think it would be a quite wide-ranging discussion that would be off-topic here (and possibly the EA Forum in general). I appreciate this may be frustrating, and if you think it would be important or very helpful to you to understand my views in more detail I’d be happy to have a conversation elsewhere (e.g. send me a PM and we can find a time to call).
FWIW, while I suspect we have a lot of underlying disagreements in this area, I’ve appreciated your pushback against orthodox liberal views in other discussions on this forum, and I’m sorry that your comment here was downvoted.
Small point that’s not central to your argument:
I had actually also asked WANBAM at some point whether they considered adding male mentors as well but for different reasons.
I think at least some women would still prefer female mentors. Anecdotally, I often made the experience that it’s easier for other women to relate to some of my work-related struggles and that it’s generally easier for me to discuss those struggles with women. This is definitely not true in every case but the hit rate (of connections where talking about work-struggles works really well) among women is much higher than among men and I expect this to be true for many other women as well.
That makes perfect sense to me. But a co-ed mentoring group would presumably be able to offer female mentors to those who wanted them, leaving it equally good for those who preferred women and superior for those who were open-minded or preferred men. I guess some women might be too shy to specify “and I would like a women” in a mixed group, so having WANBAM allows them to satisfy their preference more discretely.
In short: yes, we are open to funding other mentorship programmes, including ones open to men.
I would be pretty sad if people felt less motivated to start a mentorship programme because we already funded another. I am hoping for the opposite effect. I agree that mentorship is very valuable.
My intuition is that people consider us willing to fund a project with one target audience as positive evidence for us willing to fund a similar project with a different target audience, as it provides proof of concept that we are willing to fund such projects in principle. For example, we have funded fundraising & tax-deductibility initiatives in different countries so far and we keep seeing applications for them.
If someone wants to start a mentorship programme with a different target audience to WANBAM, I am keen for them to apply to the Meta Fund.
I agree with Denise. Although it’s worth noting that our bar for a mentorship program worth funding does have to be quite high.
I am not the meta fund, but I’d be excited to see a variety of quality mentoring schemes in EA with different goals (just like I’d be excited to see a variety of career coaching organisations and charity evaluators)
Hi, I am the CEO of WANBAM. I would be delighted to welcome and support emerging EA mentorship programs with lessons learnt and advice. You can reach me at eamentorshipprogram@gmail.com. One of the things I love about WANBAM is we are experimenting with what works (and doesn’t)! I hope as we dial it in we will add value to emerging projects with lots of different communities and purposes. Be in touch! :)