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.
This makes sense to me + and I agree RE: other factors that can change whether something is a problem or not. I think I was too certain in my wording of the original bullet point, and can see where it could be harmful if applied too broadly. I guess my prior here is that most people are not intentionally wanting to cause harm, but do so because of different expectations or communication norms or social abilities. If true, I wonder whether some clear examples that are generally seen to be controversially unwanted by those on the receiving end can help reduce the frequency of harmful actions—it might be helpful in getting folks on the same page in terms of what a lower bound for acceptable behaviour in this context looks like.
For example, someone might not consider an particular action “sexual harassment”, but 80% of women on the receiving end might find it uncomfortable and would prefer it if it didn’t happen. In some of these cases it’s probably valuable for there to be a norm that such actions just shouldn’t happen. Agreeing to the text as stated doesn’t do much to reduce these “misunderstandings”. Giving some examples (while being clear that you can report incidents that don’t fit these examples) also mean that if someone then does [inappropriate action], that folks don’t really have the excuse of “sorry I didn’t think this was inappropriate” / “didn’t consider this sexual harassment, it was just a harmless joke”. It also has fairly little downside risk, because if there was some hyper-specific context where it was seen to be appropriate by the receiving party even if it fit an example given, they just simply won’t report it. I’m uncertain about this though, since I don’t have a clear sense of what the distribution of harm and cases look like.
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.
Yeah, totally agree with this, hence “potential” action, though I think I wasn’t clear enough here.
I am interested in your thoughts whether data collection at EAGs have been effective or useful for capturing these kinds of incidents, how the community health team has responded, whether any of this is share-able in a deanonymised way? Also, does the community health team expect to continue sharing summaries similar to what you published in this appendix going forwards? I found this quite useful personally in getting a sense of how the community health team operates and think it’s somewhat useful for trust-building and accountability.
I am interested in your thoughts whether data collection at EAGs have been effective or useful for capturing these kinds of incidents, how the community health team has responded, whether any of this is share-able in a deanonymised way?
Learning about what kind of problems people have experienced has led us to changes like asking attendees not to use Swapcard for dating purposes.
does the community health team expect to continue sharing summaries similar to what you published in this appendix going forwards? I found this quite useful personally in getting a sense of how the community health team operates and think it’s somewhat useful for trust-building and accountability.
I’m glad you found it useful! Getting the right level of anonymity with that list was tricky, so I could imagine doing it at some interval but not every year.
Thanks for the response and clarification!
This makes sense to me + and I agree RE: other factors that can change whether something is a problem or not. I think I was too certain in my wording of the original bullet point, and can see where it could be harmful if applied too broadly. I guess my prior here is that most people are not intentionally wanting to cause harm, but do so because of different expectations or communication norms or social abilities. If true, I wonder whether some clear examples that are generally seen to be controversially unwanted by those on the receiving end can help reduce the frequency of harmful actions—it might be helpful in getting folks on the same page in terms of what a lower bound for acceptable behaviour in this context looks like.
For example, someone might not consider an particular action “sexual harassment”, but 80% of women on the receiving end might find it uncomfortable and would prefer it if it didn’t happen. In some of these cases it’s probably valuable for there to be a norm that such actions just shouldn’t happen. Agreeing to the text as stated doesn’t do much to reduce these “misunderstandings”. Giving some examples (while being clear that you can report incidents that don’t fit these examples) also mean that if someone then does [inappropriate action], that folks don’t really have the excuse of “sorry I didn’t think this was inappropriate” / “didn’t consider this sexual harassment, it was just a harmless joke”. It also has fairly little downside risk, because if there was some hyper-specific context where it was seen to be appropriate by the receiving party even if it fit an example given, they just simply won’t report it. I’m uncertain about this though, since I don’t have a clear sense of what the distribution of harm and cases look like.
Yeah, totally agree with this, hence “potential” action, though I think I wasn’t clear enough here.
I am interested in your thoughts whether data collection at EAGs have been effective or useful for capturing these kinds of incidents, how the community health team has responded, whether any of this is share-able in a deanonymised way? Also, does the community health team expect to continue sharing summaries similar to what you published in this appendix going forwards? I found this quite useful personally in getting a sense of how the community health team operates and think it’s somewhat useful for trust-building and accountability.
Learning about what kind of problems people have experienced has led us to changes like asking attendees not to use Swapcard for dating purposes.
I’m glad you found it useful! Getting the right level of anonymity with that list was tricky, so I could imagine doing it at some interval but not every year.