This doesn’t really respond to the thrust of what you’re saying here, but just responding to:
there are no clear guidelines regarding appropriate and inappropriate behavior at different types of EA events
I wanted to check that you’re aware that at least EA Global and EAGx events require all attendees to agree to our code of conduct. To save readers a click, it is currently:
___
At EA Global and social events associated with EA Global, you agree to:
Respect the boundaries of other participants.
Look out for one another and try to help if you can.
Adhere to national and local health and safety regulations, as well as any additional policies we institute for EA Global.
This is a professional learning and networking event. These behaviors don’t belong at EA Global or related events:
Unwanted sexual attention, or sexual harassment of any kind.
Using the event app to request meetings for romantic or sexual reasons.
Offensive, disruptive, or discriminatory actions or communication.
We understand that human interaction is complex. If you feel able, please give each other the benefit of explaining behavior you find unwelcome or offensive.
If you’re asked to stop a behavior that’s causing a problem for someone, we expect you to stop immediately.
By submitting this form, you confirm that you will adhere to this Code of Conduct, which applies at the conference and all related social events.
All our conferences have at least one community contact person, whose role is to be available for personal or interpersonal problems that come up. Feedback can also be left anonymously on the event survey, or on the community health team’s anonymous contact form.
___
It seems plausible to me that this isn’t sufficient, and we’re open to input on how these could be improved.
Thanks for posting this, Ollie! I had seen these guidelines, but it may be helpful to use them to elaborate on what I mean. I think this code of conduct isn’t sufficient per the criteria I outlined, in that:
It lacks a working definition of sexual harassment. The statement says “unwanted sexual attention, or sexual harassment of any kind.” This suggests that sexual harassment is different from unwanted sexual attention, but doesn’t make clear what the latter is.
These guidelines don’t clarify how expectations regarding appropriate behavior may differ at different kinds of EA events, since “EA Global or related events” are lumped together. I think there’s a fair bit of consensus that norms regarding behavior should differ between, e.g., EAG after parties and 1-on-1 meetings. (I think @Nathan Young ran some polls that suggested people endorse something along these lines, although a more formal survey would be helpful.)
Taken literally, these guidelines don’t seem to map onto community norms—including, I think, totally reasonable ones—regarding appropriate conduct. For instance, “These behaviors don’t belong at EA Global or related events: Unwanted sexual attention” would seem to suggest that if Amy hit on Bob at an EAG after party (“related event”), and he politely rebuffed her (“unwanted sexual attention”) and she stopped, Amy would have violated the code of conduct. In practice, I don’t think the Bobs of EA would ever report the Amys for this behavior, but that’s kind of the problem! If the code of conduct conflicts with established norms in the community—which will be much more powerful drivers of behavior—then they aren’t very helpful.
These guidelines only apply to EAGs/EAGxs (right?), and thus wouldn’t apply to, e.g., the misconduct OCB engaged in.
I think the Guide to norms on the Forum may serve as a useful point of comparison here: these guidlines are detailed, thorough, clear, and include helpful examples. Similarly, I think the most useful part of the EAG code of conduct is this: “These behaviors don’t belong at EA Global… using the event app to request meetings for romantic or sexual reasons.” That is helpful and clear guidance. Presumably, other kinds of specific behaviors (and why they’re problematic or not) could similarly be mentioned and discussed. Indeed, some of Julia’s thoughts on this—which are sprinkled around the Forum—could serve as a useful jumping-off point in developing this.
I worry that part of what’s going on here is that CEA doesn’t want to go on the record with a stance of “here is when it’s acceptable to hit on someone in EA” because this isn’t a stance it’s seen as acceptable for a professional organization to hold. I can understand that, but if the practice of the community is to tolerate (and indeed, defend and embrace) people being able to connect romantically, then there should be clearer parameters around this.
If CEA doesn’t want to go on the record with that position, perhaps it’d be worth establishing an independent committee to survey the community on the norms they’d want to see in place. Said committe could also assess and analyze other community’s guidelines on this stuff (although I suspect most would be similarly vague and/or include blanket bans). These two things could then be used to develop clearer guidelines, which could be posted on the Forum and revised on the basis of community input.
Again, I know this stuff is really hard, and I do appreciate EAG having a code of conduct that makes clear that certain behaviors aren’t allowed. I just think clearer guidance would be helpful.
Thanks for this, lilly! We really appreciate your input on the norms here, thanks for taking the time :)
Some things I think I straightforwardly agree with:
I think you’re right to point out that appropriate standards will differ across a wide range of contexts. This poses a thorny challenge for setting norms.
Some language in our code of conduct might be unnecessarily vague—“related events” for example, is vague and could be worth clarifying. Thanks for this feedback.
I think it’s worth considering investigating what the community thinks about norms. I’ll suggest this to Catherine, who’s investigating the experience of women, non-binary and trans people in EA (obviously, this is relevant to the experience of men in the community too, but that seems like a good project to consider incorporating this into).
I think there’s a tricky trade-off between clarity and scope here. This isn’t what you’re suggesting, but as a toy example to bring out this trade-off: if we state guidelines that are very specific (e.g. a list of things you mustn’t do in specific contexts), we might fail to prevent harmful behaviour that isn’t on the list. If our guidelines are something extremely wide in scope but non-specific (e.g. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), they’re hard to enforce because people can bend them to justify their behaviour (“but I would have felt fine if they hit on me!”).
My sense is that pre-specified criteria for what constitutes something like “offensive actions” or “unwanted sexual attention” and what the response should be isn’t realistic or a good idea. A lot of factors play into what constitutes a problem — words, body language, setting (the career fair vs. an afterparty vs. a deserted street outside the venue at night), power and status differences between the people, etc. Responses should be shaped by the wishes of the person who experienced the problem — people have different preferences about how much action they want us to take, whether they want us to act immediately or give them time to think over the options, etc.
Another challenge is that CEA is the host of some events but not the host of some others associated with the conferences. We can’t force an afterparty host or a bar manager to agree to follow our guidelines though we sometimes collaborate on setting norms or encourage certain practices.
I think there’s a tricky trade-off between clarity and scope here....if we state guidelines that are very specific (e.g. a list of things you mustn’t do in specific contexts), we might fail to prevent harmful behaviour that isn’t on the list.
I want to gently push back on this a bit—I don’t think this is necessarily a tradeoff. It’s not clear to me that the guidelines have to be all-inclusive or nothing. As an example, just because the guidelines say you can’t use the swapcard app for dating purposes, it would be pretty unreasonable for people to interpret that as “oh, the guidelines don’t say I can’t use the swapcard app to scam people, that must mean this is endorsed by CEA”.
And even if it’s the case that the current guidelines don’t explicitly comment against using swapcard to scam other attendees, and this contributes to some degree of “failing to prevent harmful behaviour that isn’t on the list”, that seems like a bad reason to choose to not state “don’t use swapcard for sexual purposes”.
RE: guidelines that include helpful examples, here’s one that I found from 10secs of googling.
First it defines harrassment and sexual harrassment fairly broadly. Of course, what exactly counts as “reasonably be expected or be perceived to cause offence or humiliation” can differ between people, but this is a marginal improvement compared to current EAG guidelines that simply state “unwanted sexual attention or sexual harrassment”.
It then gives a non-exhaustive list of fairly uncontroversial actions for its context—CEA can adopt its own standard! But I think it’s fair to say that just because this list doesn’t cover every possibility it doesn’t necessarily mean the list is not worth including.
Notably, it also outlines a complaint process and details possible actions that may reasonably occur in response to a complaint.
As I responded to Julia’s comment that you linked, I think these lists can be helpful because most reported cases are likely not from people intentionally wishing to cause harm, but differences in norms or communication or expectations around what might be considered harmful. Having a explicit list of actions helps get around these differences by being more precise about actions that are likely to be considered net negative in expectation. If it’s the case that there are a lot of examples that are in a grey area, then this may be an argument to exclude those examples, but it isn’t really an argument against having a list that contains less ambiguous examples.
Ditto RE: different settings—this is an argument to have narrower scope for the guidelines, and to not write a single guideline that is intended to cover both the career fair and the afterparty, but not an argument against expressing what’s unacceptable under one specific setting (especially when that setting is something as crucial as “EAG conference time”)
Lastly, RE: “Responses should be shaped by the wishes of the person who experienced the problem”—of course it should be! But a list of possible actions that might be taken can be helpful without committing the team to a set response, but the inclusion of potential actions that can be taken is still reassuring and helpful for people to know what can be possible.
Again, this was just the first link I clicked, I don’t think it’s perfect, but I think there are multiple aspects of this that CEA could use to help with further iterations of its guidelines.
Another challenge is that CEA is the host of some events but not the host of some others associated with the conferences. We can’t force an afterparty host or a bar manager to agree to follow our guidelines though we sometimes collaborate on setting norms or encourage certain practices.
I think it’s fine to start from CEA’s circle of influence and have good guidelines + norms for CEA events—if things go well this may incentivise other organisers to adopt these practices (or perhaps they won’t adopt it, because the context is sufficiently different, which is fine too!) But even if other organisers don’t adopt better guidelines, this doesn’t seem like a particularly strong argument against adopting clearer guidelines for CEA events. The UNFCCC presumably aren’t using “oh, we can’t control what happens in UN Youth events globally, and we can’t force them to agree to follow our guidelines” as an excuse to not have guidelines. But because they have their own guidelines, and many UN Youth events try to emulate what the UN event proper looks like, they will (at least try to) adopt a similar level of formality.
One last reason to err on the side of more precise guidelines echoes point 3 in what lilly shared above—if guidelines are vague and more open to interpretation by the Community Health team, this requires a higher level of trust in the CH team’s track record and decision-making and management of CoIs, etc. To whatever extent recent events may reflect actual gaps in this process or even just a change in the perception here, erring on the side of clearer guidelines can help with accountability and trust building.
I think it’s good to observe this! I also have some baseline wariness about trying to codify subtle human behaviors into policy; I don’t think people think good guidelines are bad, it’s just hard to develop good guidelines. But it’d also be helpful to even just make explicit what people understand existing norms to be, because then we could have a more grounded conversation about what they should be.
Minor not, I doubt CEA is ever gonna write “you might meet someone you have great chemistry with and make out with them”. So the range of norms they can describe might be limited.
Re point 4, CEA’s role is different as it pertains to CEA events than for non-CEA events. Only in the former case does it speak with the power of an event organizer, which gives it a clear basis to regulate.
(I would extend CEA’s “jurisdiction” as organizer to include everything an event attendee does in the city/region of the event immediately before, during, and immediately after the event.)
So any statement about conduct in non-CEA spaces should probably be separate from the code of conduct at CEA events.
I share Ellie’s disappointment that CEA lacks explicit public guidelines around sexual harassment. I’m glad there’s something in place for EAG, but I find the lack of discussion about power dynamics to be a glaring omission. Power dynamics seem to have been at the root of Owen’s bad behavior, and have been a known issue in EA programming since at least 2016, when “a staff member leading [CEA’s Pareto Fellowship program] appeared to plan a romantic relationship with a fellow during the program.”
Side note: while that issue with the Pareto Fellowship sounded fairly innocuous, if the program evaluation that was promised had actually been published it could have raised awareness of these issues and led to more explicit codes of conduct, potentially preventing offenses like Owen’s (which he claims were at least partially driven by a lack of awareness around power dynamics).
This is definitely not sufficient. Compare it to this code of conduct for a non-professional dance event, which is way better. Or to the code of conduct for the other EA (the games company), which is the first result if you google “EA code of conduct”. (The latter would probably be overlong for a conference event, but it’s a good indicator of what type of things could go in there).
The main thing missing in your code is that there is no indication for what to do if someone feels like an offence has occurred. Whereas the dance club code has a clear indication of who to talk to about bad behaviour, where to find them, and what actions will be taken in response.
I’d also suggest including more examples of unwelcome behavior. For example, if someone is subjected to personal insults at an event, it’s presumably unacceptable under the “disruptive” rule, but there’s a little ambiguity there that might add to reluctance to report. Whereas if they read the EA UK CoC, they can just point to the “personal insult” example.
This doesn’t really respond to the thrust of what you’re saying here, but just responding to:
I wanted to check that you’re aware that at least EA Global and EAGx events require all attendees to agree to our code of conduct. To save readers a click, it is currently:
___
At EA Global and social events associated with EA Global, you agree to:
Respect the boundaries of other participants.
Look out for one another and try to help if you can.
Adhere to national and local health and safety regulations, as well as any additional policies we institute for EA Global.
This is a professional learning and networking event. These behaviors don’t belong at EA Global or related events:
Unwanted sexual attention, or sexual harassment of any kind.
Using the event app to request meetings for romantic or sexual reasons.
Offensive, disruptive, or discriminatory actions or communication.
We understand that human interaction is complex. If you feel able, please give each other the benefit of explaining behavior you find unwelcome or offensive.
If you’re asked to stop a behavior that’s causing a problem for someone, we expect you to stop immediately.
By submitting this form, you confirm that you will adhere to this Code of Conduct, which applies at the conference and all related social events.
You can contact us at hello@eaglobal.org if you have any questions.
All our conferences have at least one community contact person, whose role is to be available for personal or interpersonal problems that come up. Feedback can also be left anonymously on the event survey, or on the community health team’s anonymous contact form.
___
It seems plausible to me that this isn’t sufficient, and we’re open to input on how these could be improved.
Thanks for posting this, Ollie! I had seen these guidelines, but it may be helpful to use them to elaborate on what I mean. I think this code of conduct isn’t sufficient per the criteria I outlined, in that:
It lacks a working definition of sexual harassment. The statement says “unwanted sexual attention, or sexual harassment of any kind.” This suggests that sexual harassment is different from unwanted sexual attention, but doesn’t make clear what the latter is.
These guidelines don’t clarify how expectations regarding appropriate behavior may differ at different kinds of EA events, since “EA Global or related events” are lumped together. I think there’s a fair bit of consensus that norms regarding behavior should differ between, e.g., EAG after parties and 1-on-1 meetings. (I think @Nathan Young ran some polls that suggested people endorse something along these lines, although a more formal survey would be helpful.)
Taken literally, these guidelines don’t seem to map onto community norms—including, I think, totally reasonable ones—regarding appropriate conduct. For instance, “These behaviors don’t belong at EA Global or related events: Unwanted sexual attention” would seem to suggest that if Amy hit on Bob at an EAG after party (“related event”), and he politely rebuffed her (“unwanted sexual attention”) and she stopped, Amy would have violated the code of conduct. In practice, I don’t think the Bobs of EA would ever report the Amys for this behavior, but that’s kind of the problem! If the code of conduct conflicts with established norms in the community—which will be much more powerful drivers of behavior—then they aren’t very helpful.
These guidelines only apply to EAGs/EAGxs (right?), and thus wouldn’t apply to, e.g., the misconduct OCB engaged in.
I think the Guide to norms on the Forum may serve as a useful point of comparison here: these guidlines are detailed, thorough, clear, and include helpful examples. Similarly, I think the most useful part of the EAG code of conduct is this: “These behaviors don’t belong at EA Global… using the event app to request meetings for romantic or sexual reasons.” That is helpful and clear guidance. Presumably, other kinds of specific behaviors (and why they’re problematic or not) could similarly be mentioned and discussed. Indeed, some of Julia’s thoughts on this—which are sprinkled around the Forum—could serve as a useful jumping-off point in developing this.
I worry that part of what’s going on here is that CEA doesn’t want to go on the record with a stance of “here is when it’s acceptable to hit on someone in EA” because this isn’t a stance it’s seen as acceptable for a professional organization to hold. I can understand that, but if the practice of the community is to tolerate (and indeed, defend and embrace) people being able to connect romantically, then there should be clearer parameters around this.
If CEA doesn’t want to go on the record with that position, perhaps it’d be worth establishing an independent committee to survey the community on the norms they’d want to see in place. Said committe could also assess and analyze other community’s guidelines on this stuff (although I suspect most would be similarly vague and/or include blanket bans). These two things could then be used to develop clearer guidelines, which could be posted on the Forum and revised on the basis of community input.
Again, I know this stuff is really hard, and I do appreciate EAG having a code of conduct that makes clear that certain behaviors aren’t allowed. I just think clearer guidance would be helpful.
Thanks for this, lilly! We really appreciate your input on the norms here, thanks for taking the time :)
Some things I think I straightforwardly agree with:
I think you’re right to point out that appropriate standards will differ across a wide range of contexts. This poses a thorny challenge for setting norms.
Some language in our code of conduct might be unnecessarily vague—“related events” for example, is vague and could be worth clarifying. Thanks for this feedback.
I think it’s worth considering investigating what the community thinks about norms. I’ll suggest this to Catherine, who’s investigating the experience of women, non-binary and trans people in EA (obviously, this is relevant to the experience of men in the community too, but that seems like a good project to consider incorporating this into).
I think there’s a tricky trade-off between clarity and scope here. This isn’t what you’re suggesting, but as a toy example to bring out this trade-off: if we state guidelines that are very specific (e.g. a list of things you mustn’t do in specific contexts), we might fail to prevent harmful behaviour that isn’t on the list. If our guidelines are something extremely wide in scope but non-specific (e.g. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), they’re hard to enforce because people can bend them to justify their behaviour (“but I would have felt fine if they hit on me!”).
Here’s something related that Julia wrote recently:
Another challenge is that CEA is the host of some events but not the host of some others associated with the conferences. We can’t force an afterparty host or a bar manager to agree to follow our guidelines though we sometimes collaborate on setting norms or encourage certain practices.
Again, thanks so much for engaging here.
Hey Ollie! Hope you’re well.
I want to gently push back on this a bit—I don’t think this is necessarily a tradeoff. It’s not clear to me that the guidelines have to be all-inclusive or nothing. As an example, just because the guidelines say you can’t use the swapcard app for dating purposes, it would be pretty unreasonable for people to interpret that as “oh, the guidelines don’t say I can’t use the swapcard app to scam people, that must mean this is endorsed by CEA”.
And even if it’s the case that the current guidelines don’t explicitly comment against using swapcard to scam other attendees, and this contributes to some degree of “failing to prevent harmful behaviour that isn’t on the list”, that seems like a bad reason to choose to not state “don’t use swapcard for sexual purposes”.
RE: guidelines that include helpful examples, here’s one that I found from 10secs of googling.
First it defines harrassment and sexual harrassment fairly broadly. Of course, what exactly counts as “reasonably be expected or be perceived to cause offence or humiliation” can differ between people, but this is a marginal improvement compared to current EAG guidelines that simply state “unwanted sexual attention or sexual harrassment”.
It then gives a non-exhaustive list of fairly uncontroversial actions for its context—CEA can adopt its own standard! But I think it’s fair to say that just because this list doesn’t cover every possibility it doesn’t necessarily mean the list is not worth including.
Notably, it also outlines a complaint process and details possible actions that may reasonably occur in response to a complaint.
As I responded to Julia’s comment that you linked, I think these lists can be helpful because most reported cases are likely not from people intentionally wishing to cause harm, but differences in norms or communication or expectations around what might be considered harmful. Having a explicit list of actions helps get around these differences by being more precise about actions that are likely to be considered net negative in expectation. If it’s the case that there are a lot of examples that are in a grey area, then this may be an argument to exclude those examples, but it isn’t really an argument against having a list that contains less ambiguous examples.
Ditto RE: different settings—this is an argument to have narrower scope for the guidelines, and to not write a single guideline that is intended to cover both the career fair and the afterparty, but not an argument against expressing what’s unacceptable under one specific setting (especially when that setting is something as crucial as “EAG conference time”)
Lastly, RE: “Responses should be shaped by the wishes of the person who experienced the problem”—of course it should be! But a list of possible actions that might be taken can be helpful without committing the team to a set response, but the inclusion of potential actions that can be taken is still reassuring and helpful for people to know what can be possible.
Again, this was just the first link I clicked, I don’t think it’s perfect, but I think there are multiple aspects of this that CEA could use to help with further iterations of its guidelines.
I think it’s fine to start from CEA’s circle of influence and have good guidelines + norms for CEA events—if things go well this may incentivise other organisers to adopt these practices (or perhaps they won’t adopt it, because the context is sufficiently different, which is fine too!) But even if other organisers don’t adopt better guidelines, this doesn’t seem like a particularly strong argument against adopting clearer guidelines for CEA events. The UNFCCC presumably aren’t using “oh, we can’t control what happens in UN Youth events globally, and we can’t force them to agree to follow our guidelines” as an excuse to not have guidelines. But because they have their own guidelines, and many UN Youth events try to emulate what the UN event proper looks like, they will (at least try to) adopt a similar level of formality.
One last reason to err on the side of more precise guidelines echoes point 3 in what lilly shared above—if guidelines are vague and more open to interpretation by the Community Health team, this requires a higher level of trust in the CH team’s track record and decision-making and management of CoIs, etc. To whatever extent recent events may reflect actual gaps in this process or even just a change in the perception here, erring on the side of clearer guidelines can help with accountability and trust building.
I notice feeling scared about setting norms across all EA events. That’s not to say it’s bad.
I think it’s good to observe this! I also have some baseline wariness about trying to codify subtle human behaviors into policy; I don’t think people think good guidelines are bad, it’s just hard to develop good guidelines. But it’d also be helpful to even just make explicit what people understand existing norms to be, because then we could have a more grounded conversation about what they should be.
yeah that’s my sense also.
Minor not, I doubt CEA is ever gonna write “you might meet someone you have great chemistry with and make out with them”. So the range of norms they can describe might be limited.
Re point 4, CEA’s role is different as it pertains to CEA events than for non-CEA events. Only in the former case does it speak with the power of an event organizer, which gives it a clear basis to regulate.
(I would extend CEA’s “jurisdiction” as organizer to include everything an event attendee does in the city/region of the event immediately before, during, and immediately after the event.)
So any statement about conduct in non-CEA spaces should probably be separate from the code of conduct at CEA events.
I share Ellie’s disappointment that CEA lacks explicit public guidelines around sexual harassment. I’m glad there’s something in place for EAG, but I find the lack of discussion about power dynamics to be a glaring omission. Power dynamics seem to have been at the root of Owen’s bad behavior, and have been a known issue in EA programming since at least 2016, when “a staff member leading [CEA’s Pareto Fellowship program] appeared to plan a romantic relationship with a fellow during the program.”
Side note: while that issue with the Pareto Fellowship sounded fairly innocuous, if the program evaluation that was promised had actually been published it could have raised awareness of these issues and led to more explicit codes of conduct, potentially preventing offenses like Owen’s (which he claims were at least partially driven by a lack of awareness around power dynamics).
This is definitely not sufficient. Compare it to this code of conduct for a non-professional dance event, which is way better. Or to the code of conduct for the other EA (the games company), which is the first result if you google “EA code of conduct”. (The latter would probably be overlong for a conference event, but it’s a good indicator of what type of things could go in there).
The main thing missing in your code is that there is no indication for what to do if someone feels like an offence has occurred. Whereas the dance club code has a clear indication of who to talk to about bad behaviour, where to find them, and what actions will be taken in response.
I’d also suggest including more examples of unwelcome behavior. For example, if someone is subjected to personal insults at an event, it’s presumably unacceptable under the “disruptive” rule, but there’s a little ambiguity there that might add to reluctance to report. Whereas if they read the EA UK CoC, they can just point to the “personal insult” example.